Is it possible to reset footnote count within a document?

mrtrilby

Hi. I am required to join 2 documents into 1 for my studies, which is not a problem for LibreOffice - I can reset page numbers and start anew after my first paper within the same document. However, when inserting footnotes with Zotero, I am not sure if it can be done - e.g. I have footnotes 1-12 for the first part of the document, and then I want to start at footnote 1 for the second part of the document where my page numbering has been reset to 1 again, but as it is now, it continues from footnote 13.

I hope the question made sense - is this possible to do in Zotero..? I guess it needs to be done also for the bibliography, to separate them.

adomasven

No, it is not possible. Multiple bibliographies and footnote resetting is not supported by Zotero. I recommend to work on the documents separately, then before submission unlink Zotero citations and combine them manually. Make sure to keep a copy of original unmerged documents with Zotero links in case you need to edit them further.

mrtrilby

Thank you for such a clear answer! Good suggestion, I will do it this way.

adamsmith

It's not supported in Zotero, but if you just want to have your footnotes restart at 1 at a given point, that's just a Word setting, no Zotero involved: You create a section break in Word and then set footnotes to restart in that section (you can google details for your Word version). This will work for any footnote, including those inserted by Zotero.
The only thing that won't work, because it _is_ handled by Zotero, are crossreferences to other footnotes (as in "supra note 3"). But few citation styles use those.

mrtrilby

Oooh, you have me intrigued, again! So it sounds like it could be done. I am, however, using LibreOffice, so I have to see if I can make it happen there (I made an initial attempt, and it did not work out well), although I actually have to upload the final as docx, which means I could potentially edit it in Word afterwards, and restart the footnotes there. Thanks for the glimmer of hope! :)

adamsmith

See answers for LO here: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/203316/how-to-restart-footnotes-at-1-for-each-section/

The overall answer from the Zotero end is the same: footnote numbering is handled by the word processor, not Zotero, so it can generally be changed there and will just work with Zotero with the above caveat.

mrtrilby

Fabulous - your link helped me fix it - I only had to mark the text area before Insert->Section in LO. That fixed it for me, I am most grateful!

The only thing remaining, although not sure if it belongs under another topic, is when I now insert bibliography in each section, it retains books across the sections (Zotero is not likely to be aware of them), and so I have to manually edit the inserted sources in each section. Microscopic issue in my case, because now you have saved me hours of work in manual editing!