Footnote not generated when inserting citation in LibreOffice Table

cmt29

I am having problems entering citations into a LibreOffice table.

Steps to reproduce problem:
1. Open new Libreoffice writer document & Zotero Standalone.
2. Add a table.
3. Click in a table cell.
4. Click Insert Citation.
5. Citation is added directly to the cell, not in a footnote.

To get a footnote, I have to Insert footnote manually in Libreoffice, then insert citation. But I think this ends up confusing Zotero since subsequent references to works don't abbreviate as I'd expect.

Details of my platform:
Kubuntu 13.04
Libreoffice 4.0.2.2
Zotero 4.0.8

adamsmith

can confirm that on LO 3.6
Simon would have to comment on whether this is a LO limitation or can be fixed in the plugin. As cmt says, generally footnotes can be entered in tables in LO.

cmt29

Thanks for confirming this potential bug.

The main problem from my point of view is that "ibid." style abbreviations become inconsistent across different cells. So some of the references I insert get another full listing rather than an abbreviated listing, whilst others work OK.

In fact, clicking 'Refresh References' sometimes reorganises all the references with different ones becoming full or abbreviated.

I hope that makes sense. I can provide an example if necessary.

The only way I could achieve consistency and correct output was by merging all the cells in which I had footnotes.

adamsmith

This might be impossible to avoid - IIRC it didn't use to be possible to insert references in tables at all in LibreOffice. One of the obstacles was that LibreOffice doesn't return a proper location for items in tables, so that it's not technically possible for Zotero to correctly use location-specific citaton features like "ibid" and abbreviated references.
Simon is the one who knows this for sure, but I'm pretty confident I'm remembering that correctly, so you may want to think about workarounds for this issue.

cmt29

Ah, OK, thanks. Do you think I should ask LO to think about fixing this, if it's more their problem?

adamsmith

we'd want confirmation from Simon and a better description of the problem before that makes sense

Simon

As adamsmith says, LibreOffice is pretty bad when it comes to tables, but the issues here are probably not bugs in LO, just a consequence of the difficulty of working with their API. I've created a ticket.