Problem with footnotes when exporting into docx

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peter.malik
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Problem with footnotes when exporting into docx

Post by peter.malik »

Greetings y’all,

For some reason I can never export my Mellel files to docx right. In particular, my problem is that the superscript of my footnote reference symbols is lost and becomes normal size in Word. This has been a lingering issue for a longest time now but I've always let the editors take care of it. Now I’ll be assuming some editorial responsibilities and would prefer to do all my stuff in Mellel whilst ensuring smooth export. Failing that, my editorial duties will prove jolly annoying.

Do you know if anyone else has experienced similar issues? What's the workaround?
Amontillado
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Re: Problem with footnotes when exporting into docx

Post by Amontillado »

Interesting. If I export a test document with a footnote, Nisus Writer Pro and Apple Pages open the docx with the footnote reference superscripted both in the main part of the document and on the footnote itself. I don't have a copy of Word.

However, if I open the exported docx with Mellel, feeding Mellel its own export, the footnote marker in the document is superscripted but the reference in the footnote itself isn't.

My guess is there must be a cure for this with character styles.

Here is what Mellel wrote for the footnote. I'm not knowledgable enough about docx to troubleshoot this:

<w:footnotes xmlns:wps='http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/wor ... ssingShape' xmlns:w='http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordp ... /2006/main' xmlns:w14='http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2010/wordml' xmlns:pic='http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawi ... 06/picture' xmlns:wp='http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawi ... ingDrawing' xmlns:r='http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/offic ... ationships' xmlns:a='http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawi ... w:footnote w:id='1'><w:p><w:pPr><w:pStyle w:val='Notetext'/></w:pPr><w:r><w:footnoteRef/><w:t>.</w:t><w:tab/></w:r><w:r><w:rPr><w:lang w:val='en' w:bidi='en' w:eastAsia='en'/></w:rPr><w:t>Text of footnote here.</w:t></w:r></w:p></w:footnote></w:footnotes>

As a sidelight, BBEdit is a nice tool for looking at docx internals. Rename the file from whatever.docx to whatever.zip and open it in BBEdit. You can navigate through the components of the document and edit them without having to manually extract the zip file. Cool!
peter.malik
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Re: Problem with footnotes when exporting into docx

Post by peter.malik »

Something definitely must be off with my character styles, but I can’t pinpoint this. I tried using Mellel’s default modern style set and the export was unproblematic. I tried changing various settings but was unable to achieve any desired results.
peter.malik
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Joined: Sat Nov 26, 2011 4:13 pm
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Re: Problem with footnotes when exporting into docx

Post by peter.malik »

OK, I think I’ve nailed it. It had to do with the character style I used specifically for the reference symbol. For some reason the export tag wouldn’t transfer as superscript because of the OpenType features used in the Mellel character style setting. These OT features, though typographically beautiful, are one hell of a nightmare when it comes to exporting!
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