Word template feature request: custom footnote text

[OskaratOmni]

Hey @dgkeyes and @tvroylandt
I hope you are both well - I have a feature request for our OMNI Word template. I'm not sure its possible because of how fields work with Word but would love to hear what you think.

Currently the footer populates the document title, such that if the yaml says:

---
title: "FRCA Report"
date: "`r format(Sys.time(), '%d %B, %Y')`"
output:
    omni::omni_word_report_new
---

The footer will say: FRCA Report | page#

What I'm wondering is if we can override this somehow, perhaps with something specified in the yaml?

So we'd have a situation like this -

---
title: "FRCA Report"
date: "`r format(Sys.time(), '%d %B, %Y')`"
output:
    omni::omni_word_report_new
footnote_text: "This report is great" 
---

The footer will say: This report is great | page#

I tried a couple of workarounds to see if I could make this happen without messing with the template. One was to see I could over-ride the text in the Word doc after knitting.

doc <- read_docx("word_test.docx")

doc <- body_add_par(doc, "Here is a note", style = "footer") # this was a chatgpt suggestion. I can't verify that this is even a valid argument

print(doc, target = "word_test_newfooter.docx")

So the goal would be to put whatever text we want in the footer. I assume that we cannot do this with css because of how Word handles fields but I am not sure. Do you see a way to do this? Thanks!

[dgkeyes]

@tvroylandt and I just chatted about it. He'll take a look and let us know if it's possible.

[OskaratOmni]

Thank you! I realize that it might not be possible, but if it isn't too hard to figure out, that's great.

[tvroylandt]

This is exactly the question you have : https://github.com/davidgohel/officedown/issues/39

And the answer is : it's not possible inside the Rmd and really complicated and kind of a hack outside.

[OskaratOmni]

Thanks @tvroylandt , this answer is pretty close to what I expected. In fact, I tried and failed an approach a little similar to the one in that thread, but mine was even more of a hack because it was outside a knitr function. Well, that doesn't matter because it didn't work anyway.

Can you please give your professional opinion on advice I can bring to the team who made this request?

Here's what I'm thinking as general advice:

• If knitting to Word for parameterized reports, there will be some disadvantages. Among these, you will have to manually open each version of the knitted reports and insert custom text in each footer if you want the footer to contain text other than the document title.
• In general, there is a lot more ability to control the appearance of reports, and the placement of text within them, when knitting to pdf or html. We recommend revisiting the workflow on this project to see if knitting to another format could be an option. If the reporting is not too frequent or the number of reports generated not too high, then maybe staying with Word is not a problem, but if it becomes a bother to manually update this text, let's consider pdf for the next round of reporting.

@tvroylandt Does those two bullets seem broadly similar to your take on the issue? And/or anything you would add? (@dgkeyes what do you think?)

Thanks!

[dgkeyes]

@OskaratOmni your assessment and summary of the situation sounds right to me. The general advice you offer is spot on. In general, we find that HTML is easiest to customize, PDF second, and Word least easy. Hope that helps!

[tvroylandt]

I agree with David