https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173239
Bug ID: 173239
Summary: Footnotes anchored inside a table cell get displaced
onto an unrelated, much earlier page — and the
footnote that actually belongs on that page disappears
Product: LibreOffice
Version: 26.2.0.3 release
Hardware: All
OS: Linux (All)
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Severity: normal
Priority: medium
Component: LibreOffice
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
Description:
In a long (~140 page) document, a table containing several footnote references
in one row (column headers, one footnote per column) has its footnotes
misplaced on PDF export (and in the Writer layout itself). The first footnote
reference in that table row renders correctly on the table's own page. Every
footnote reference after it — still within the same table row, plus one
unrelated footnote from a different clause ~5 pages further on — gets flushed
onto a single unrelated page far earlier in the document (in the attached
sample: page 29, ~100 pages before the table actually appears). The footnote
that legitimately belongs on that earlier page vanishes from the document
entirely — it isn't duplicated elsewhere, it's just gone.
Microsoft Word and Google Docs both render the same source .docx correctly:
every footnote appears on the page containing its actual anchor.
Steps to Reproduce:
Steps to reproduce (using the attached sanitized sample, sanitized.docx):
1. Open sanitized.docx in LibreOffice Writer, or convert headless: soffice
--headless --convert-to pdf sanitized.docx
2. Open the resulting PDF and go to page 29.
3. Note the footnote area at the bottom of the page: it lists six unrelated
footnotes.
4. Compare against the same source file opened in Microsoft Word or Google Docs
— footnote 2 correctly appears alone on that page, and the six other footnotes
render on the pages where their tables/clauses actually are (near the end of
the document).
Actual Results:
The footnote area at the bottom of page 29 shows six footnotes that belong to a
table and a clause roughly 100 pages later in the document (near the end). The
footnote that actually belongs on page 29 (anchored to a clause on that same
page) does not appear anywhere in the document — it is not duplicated
elsewhere, it is simply missing.
Expected Results:
Each footnote should render on the page containing its own anchor, matching how
the same source .docx is rendered by Microsoft Word and Google Docs: the
footnote anchored on page 29 should appear there, and the six footnotes
anchored inside the table/clause near the end of the document should appear on
those later pages instead.
Reproducible: Always
User Profile Reset: No
Additional Info:
Additional notes:
- I moved the misplaced footnote references out of the table cells (into a
plain paragraph immediately after the table) as a workaround. Result: those
specific footnotes then rendered correctly on the right page — but a different,
previously-correct footnote (the one on page 29 that isn't table-anchored at
all) then disappeared instead. This suggests the bug isn't specific to
table-cell anchoring — it looks like an internal footnote-container/queue
miscomputation that shifts depending on footnote sequence, not a fixed
structural trigger.
- Attached sanitized.pdf is the already-converted output for quick reference
without needing to run the conversion yourself.
- All text in the attached sample has been replaced with random placeholder
words (this is a redacted client legal document) — only the structure
(paragraph/table/footnote layout) is preserved, so line wrapping differs
slightly from a real document but the bug is unaffected.
Possibly related:
- Bug 153610 – "footnotes in tables not on the same page" (closed WORKSFORME on
an unrelated sample; that report also noted PDF export sometimes disagreeing
with the live editor view)
- Bug 98287 – "Mixing footnotes... pushes the second footnote to the next page"
(same "first one is fine, subsequent ones misbehave" shape, still open)
- Bug 103164 – [META] Footnote and Endnote bugs and enhancements (this looks
like it belongs under this tracker)
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