Re: [libreoffice-users] typographic freaks: footnotes not vertically aligned to last line of body text in following page (as in good typographic style)

At 06:06 20/12/2012 +0000, Tom Davies wrote:
> At 04:18 20/12/2012 +0000, Brian Barker wrote:
> > At 00:14 20/12/2012 +0800, Nobody Noname wrote:
> > > ... there is a thing that, if we cannot strictly to define as a 
> > > BUG, is, at least, a  "defect" regarding the right typography.  I 
> > > mean the behavior of footnotes versus the text body contained in 
> > > subsequent pages.  professionally formatted books, look like this 
> > > [...] as you can see, footnotes (last footnote) are perfectly 
> > > vertically aligned with the last line of text in following page, 
> > > while if we insert a footnote in OpenOffice/Libreoffice, this is 
> > > what we get [...] an horrible difference between footnote and last 
> > > line of body text that result not aligned that makes appearance of 
> > > documents with footnotes very ugly
> >
> > Each page has an area within its margins where text may appear.  If 
> > there is not sufficient space for a further line at the bottom of a 
> > page, it will be carried over to the next page, possibly leaving a 
> > small amount of unused vertical space within the text area of the 
> > page.  If different pages have different type sizes or different 
> > paragraph spacing - or even just a different number of paragraphs - 
> > the bases of bottom lines may well not match up.  In the case of 
> > your example, the spacing and the rule before the footnote and the 
> > reduced type size of the footnote itself all add up to mean that 
> > there can be no guarantee that the bases of the bottom lines will match up.
> >
> > In order to correct this problem, you need to make small alteration 
> > to details of one or other page.  It may be that you can remedy 
> > things by changing the bottom page margin slightly - but if you do 
> > that for the page style of the whole document, you are likely to 
> > introduce similar problems on other pages.  The simplest solution 
> > may be to increase slightly the line spacing on the second page.
> >
> > > if making this enhancement is not too hard, it will be a great 
> > > step toward dtp for LibreOffice
> >
> > It's not clear what you want to happen here.  Do you want the line 
> > spacing on your second page to be increased slightly so as better 
> > to fill the page?  Or do you want the space before the footnote to 
> > be increased?  Or both of these?  Or, if (as would be usual) you 
> > had more than one paragraph on each page, would you want the 
> > paragraph spacing to be adjusted to suit?  Or some combination of all these?
> >
> > It's worth mentioning that you are comparing your word processor 
> > results with - as you say - the appearance of a professionally 
> > produced book.  In that case, a quite separate process - "layout" - 
> > is carried out after the text is finalised.  This is done is layout 
> > software, not in word processing software.  Any modifications to 
> > the text - even minor ones - after this would potentially upset the 
> > appearance, so this is done in the final stages of production.  And 
> > I doubt whether this is ever completely automated, in fact: rather, 
> > I imagine that expert user of layout software makes minor 
> > adjustments to achieve the sort of smart appearance that you crave.
> >
> > So you are asking for OpenOffice or LibreOffice to become layout 
> > software as well as word processing software.  I have no idea 
> > whether its developers would wish to do this.
>
> Wow!!  Errr, is that something that LaTex or Scribus might be better at?

I'm not an expert in layout software, but I suspect that yes: both of 
these products have the required facilities.

> If so can they read and work with the output from LO?

Apparently Scribus can.  In any case, anyone working with layout 
software tends to expect to start with fairly plain text, perhaps 
with only italics, bold, superscripts, subscripts, and so on, along 
with footnotes, marked in the text.  The clever stuff is then all 
done in the layout software.

Brian Barker



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