From: msevior_at_physics.unimelb.edu.au
Date: Fri Nov 28 2003 - 08:24:32 EST
>> Thanks very much for your detailed descriptions of your problems with
>> footnotes. I've heard anecdotally that people have had problems with
>> them
>> but I haven't had such a nice description of the issues centralized in
>> one
>> place. I'll address these concerns and fix the problems.
>
> Thank YOU, Martin! I expected this list to be helpful, but I didn't
> think the very first reply would be a pledge to "fix the problems"!
>
No Problem. I've put a lot of time and effort into abiword and into
footntes and endnotes in particular. If there are bugs that prevent these
features from being useful or AbiWord from being used, I want to hear
about them. Clear descriptions of the issues like yours make fixing things
much easier too.
>>>4608, "very large footnotes behave very badly" (they cause crashes and
>>>file corruption)
>>
>> This is a problem if the footnote gets bigger than the size of a page. I
>> would be extremely surprised if anyone intentionaly wrote a document
>> this
>> way. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> As r coyne noted in another reply, footnotes longer than a page do
> occur, especially in legal scholarship (and yes, usually to bad
> effect!). I believe The Chicago Manual of Style (widely used in North
> American publishing) recommends that at least five lines of text appear
> above any note or group of notes that threatens to spill across an
> entire page. Would implementing such a rule make it easier for AbiWord
> to avoid the problems described in Bug 4608? I'm more worried about
> avoiding crashes than facilitating mammoth notes myself . . .
>
OK I made things so AbiWord won't crash. The document will look horrible
but hopefully your student will get the message and won't make rediculusly
large footnotes. (Mark them down anyway.)
>>>4707, "Can't select [or compose] to the right of a where a footnote was
>>>added" (this is pretty important!)
>>
>> I agree this is important I thought it was fixed. I'll check to see if
>> it
>> is and close the bug.
>
> It's still happening in 2.0.1 (Windows build), but only if the note
> number is at the end of the document. Of course, that's often where it
> is when you're drafting. Specifically, if a note number is at the end of
> the text and you want to get just to the right of it, you can't
> mouse-click to the right or below it to place the cursor at the end of
> the document, and pressing End puts you into the footnote, not at the
> end of the line. (Ctrl-End puts you where you want to go, or you can
> "sneak up on it" using the arrow keys -- but neither of these are
> intuitive solutions for people used to Word, WordPerfect, etc.) A quick
> partial fix would be to swap the functionality of End and Ctrl-End:
> People's expectation that End gets them to the end of the current line
> would not be broken, and Ctrl-End would become a consistent "switch into
> or out of note text" key chord.
>
This is fixed now. Also to get back to just after the footnote/endnote
reference press cntrl-End in the footnote/endnote text.
>>>5495, "Footnote insertion and formatting" (can't change note formatting
>>>across whole document)
>>
>> The format footnote dialog allows you to choose one of 12 different
>> footnote styles and to restart footnotes per page, or per section. I'll
>> check this again.
>
> Right -- I think we're just hoping that formatting changes could also be
> applied in one operation across a multisection document. I recently
> edited a dissertation chapter composed in MS Word that had over two
> dozen sections. It would have been a bore to perform formatting changes
> two dozen times . . .
>
I got this correct from the start. Footnote/Endnote behaviour is
document-wide. No need to change things in each section.
>>>5598, "Footnote" (can't change footnote separator line from default
>>>long-and-centered format)
>>
>> This has not been implemented true. If it's important I'll do it.
>
> It should be trivial, but it isn't. I know of a number of journals that
> would reject a manuscript with a long, centered note separator line, and
> my university would reject my dissertation if it were formatted this
> way. Stylesheets that enforce such rules almost always dictate a short,
> left-justified separator line (at least in the USA and Canada -- I won't
> generalize to other publishing cultures!). Maybe that could be the
> default until someone feels like adding a range of choices?
>
OK I changed the default behaviour to the type you requested. It's still
not editable though.
>>>5716, "Footnotes" (can't jump from note text back to body text at site
>>>of note number)
>>
>> This has not been implemented. It is actually not hard to do this. How
>> do
>> you suggest this feature be implemented.
>
> MS Word and OpenOffice.org Writer both use Ctrl-End to jump from the
> note text back to where you had been typing (just to the right of the
> new note number). In AbiWord, Ctrl-End takes you to the end of the body
> text, which is not necessarily where the note number is. I'd vote to do
> it the Word/OOo way (it's the WordPerfect way, too, only it uses Ctrl-F4
> instead.)
>
This is done now. Press cntrl-End get back to the footnote/endnote
reference. I agree that this is a very useful feature.
>>>5773, 5774, 5775 (deleting both a note and its in-text note number is
>>>difficult and/or dangerous)
>>
>> I'll check these out. It should not be either difficult or dangerous.
>
> The bug reports do a good job of describing these problems; I won't add
> more.
>
OK these are all fixed.
> One last issue I forgot to mention earlier. I like to switch to "Web
> Layout" view to reduce clutter and increase font readability. If I'm
> typing there and decide to insert footnote #1, I am moved to what looks
> like an empty document and I can't see any of my keystroke output. In
> fact, I'm in Footnote 1 and my keystrokes are being recorded -- but it's
> happening below the bottom of the screen. Once I figured this out it no
> longer bothered me, but my initial reaction was that footnotes were 100%
> broken, and maybe even Abiword was 100% broken. I will report this as a
> bug.
>
OK this is not fixed yet. I'll let you when it's done. I think you'll see
all your issues fixed in the next release.
Cheers,
Martin
-----------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
abiword-user-request_at_abisource.com with the word
unsubscribe in the message body.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Nov 28 2003 - 08:22:21 EST