Linking footnotes in Pages

You need to share exactly what your publisher means by "link the footnotes," because there are things one can do in MS Word with footnotes that simply is not available in Pages — because it is not a Word clone.

Your publisher has a valid reason for requesting that you use MS Word, not only because they use it and want a native (not translated) Word document, but also to save you significant delays in either requested document functionality, or your publisher having to deal with Pages export issues in the shared Word document.

I haven't used OpenOffice in years as LibreOffice has surpassed it in both release schedule and additional functionality. Both are MS Office clones, more or less. That said, I just inserted a footnote in a LibreOffice v7.5.5 Writer document and like Pages, it does not open a dialog, but rather just quietly inserts the footnote at the bottom of the document's current page.

And like Pages, the tiny footnote number at the document bottom is an intra-document hyperlink to its corresponding entry in the body text, and will position the insertion beam immediately before that footnote location.

Microsoft Word 16.76 will open a dialog panel when one inserts a footnote that looks like this:

Is the publisher accepting Pages documents or should you be sending an exported Word document from your Pages document?