Managing footnotes
You can insert footnotes in any document type, although they are only used for Secondary Legislation.
How to insert a footnote
Place the cursor where you would like to insert a footnote and insert one by:
Selecting ‘Insert > Insert footnote’ from the upper toolbar, or
Right-click and select ‘Insert footnote’
Keyboard short-cut Alt + f
The system will insert a footnote where your cursor is
To add text to the footnote, click on the footnote marker. (This appears as an asterisk in the Editor, but will convert to a letter when the document is rendered as a PDF, with lettering restarting on each page.)
You can add an additional paragraph to your footnote by using the keyboard shortcut ‘Shift + Enter’.
To hide the footnote, click on the footnote marker again.
How to delete a footnote
Place your cursor in the expanded footnote and select “Footnote” from the breadcrumb and click on ‘backspace’
Footnote numbering
When you generate a PDF of a document with footnotes, the footnotes will be numbered (a), (b), (c), etc., and will restart on each page of the PDF.
This is expected and there is no way to change it in Lawmaker.
Please note that when your document appears on legislation.gov.uk, the footnotes will appear on the webpage with Arabic numerals ((1), (2), (3) etc.), which run continuously throughout the document. See here for an example.
The PDF ‘King’s Printer Version' of the document will have the footnotes numbered as on Lawmaker ((a), (b), (c), etc.) and restarting on each page of the PDF. See here for an example.
You might see PDF versions of legislation with different footnotes, which have caused confusion on this matter before. These were likely created by creating a new PDF from the online version of the legislation.
Table notes
It is possible to place a footnote in a table, which will appear at the bottom of the page.
However, Lawmaker does not currently support the creation of table notes, i.e., notes that are placed at the end of the table and referenced in cells within the table, as in the screenshot below.
Example of table notes (*) and (1)
If it is necessary to include table notes, their appearance can be replicated by creating a small table straight after the existing table. Do this through the following process:
Right-click on any cell in your table.
Click Insert Table.
In the pop-up window, reduce Rows and Columns to 1 each. Uncheck Table number, Table caption and Header. Lastly, under Border options, select the fourth option across with faint lines.
Click Insert.
In the ‘Text’ placeholder, type in the text of your desired table note, including the reference mark (e.g., (*), (1) etc.)
Select the reference mark and click Format → Superscript.
If you wish to insert a second table note, place your cursor in the first table note and press 'Shift + Enter' to insert a second line of text. Repeat for additional notes.
At the relevant parts of your table, type the relevant reference marks and make them superscript as in stage 6.
NB: if you include footnotes in a Table Header row which is repeated over multiple pages, the footnotes will also repeat.
To check if you have a repeating Header row in your table, right-click on the table and click Table → Update table.
Scroll to Page setup to see if Header displayed on all pages is checked.
In this situation, we recommend either removing the footnote or unchecking Header displayed on all pages.