Can you please update on footnotes? I notice people have written posts with footnotes, so it must be possible, but I can’t figure out how. Thanks in advance
A few things I’ll add to habryka’s response, based on what did/didn’t seem to work for me:
I was struggling to make longnotes work (they were working as footnotes, but were just removing the paragraphs after the first one), but I discovered there’s also something called “bignotes”, which is basically identical but did work for me. Info here.
You can write “[^bignote2]” and “[^bignote2]:” (and then 3, 4, etc.) to have more than 1 bignote. (This wasn’t in the link I provided above, but I guessed it might work and it did. I assume the same would apply for longnotes, but I haven’t been able to get them to work.)
“indenting” for longnotes/bignotes seems to require precisely the number of spaces used in the examples on this page and the github link (this many: ” ”), or at least not just 1 space, and “tab” doesn’t work.
I’m reasonably confident the word “bignote” doesn’t matter here (and nor does “longnote”), it’s just the word chosen in that example. I just tested with “note” and it worked fine.
I do have some confusion here. It looks to me like the bignote and longnote examples are the same apart from that word. So if you tried one and it didn’t work, then tried the other and it did, I don’t know what else you would have changed. Do you happen to remember?
Yeah, I just tested it with both “longnote” and just random characters and it worked.
I can’t really remember my issue, but given that I wrote “they were working as footnotes, but were just removing the paragraphs after the first one”, I’m guessing I just hadn’t realised I have to indent, or use 4 spaces for that, until after trying “bignote” instead of “longnote”. And then I misinterpreted switching from “longnote” to “bignote” as the active ingredient that caused later paragraphs to stop disappearing.
As a reader, I’d find it quite useful to be able to jump back from the footnote to where I was in the main text. Not being able to do so slows me down, especially on long articles and when reading on an iPad (where going back to “find in page” every time is a bit annoying).
As a (just beginning to be a) writer, it’d be nice to have a footnote option pop up when I highlight text (like italics, linking, etc.), rather than having to go into markdown mode for that. (Or am I just missing the easy, WYSIWYG-mode way of doing footnotes?)
We already have a fix for the footnote backlinks at the bottom working again, which will probably be deployed sometime next week.
Agree that having footnotes in the WYSIWYG editor would be good. We are working on some editor improvements, though that one isn’t yet at the top of the list.
Am I able to make intra-article hyperlinks to allow my readers to jump to footnotes / other parts of the article?
No. Though they’re important so we will get them in the future.
Can you please update on footnotes? I notice people have written posts with footnotes, so it must be possible, but I can’t figure out how. Thanks in advance
You can use footnotes with the markdown editor. You can read about the syntax here:
https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it-footnote
A few things I’ll add to habryka’s response, based on what did/didn’t seem to work for me:
I was struggling to make longnotes work (they were working as footnotes, but were just removing the paragraphs after the first one), but I discovered there’s also something called “bignotes”, which is basically identical but did work for me. Info here.
You can write “[^bignote2]” and “[^bignote2]:” (and then 3, 4, etc.) to have more than 1 bignote. (This wasn’t in the link I provided above, but I guessed it might work and it did. I assume the same would apply for longnotes, but I haven’t been able to get them to work.)
“indenting” for longnotes/bignotes seems to require precisely the number of spaces used in the examples on this page and the github link (this many: ” ”), or at least not just 1 space, and “tab” doesn’t work.
I’m reasonably confident the word “bignote” doesn’t matter here (and nor does “longnote”), it’s just the word chosen in that example. I just tested with “note” and it worked fine.
I do have some confusion here. It looks to me like the bignote and longnote examples are the same apart from that word. So if you tried one and it didn’t work, then tried the other and it did, I don’t know what else you would have changed. Do you happen to remember?
Yeah, I just tested it with both “longnote” and just random characters and it worked.
I can’t really remember my issue, but given that I wrote “they were working as footnotes, but were just removing the paragraphs after the first one”, I’m guessing I just hadn’t realised I have to indent, or use 4 spaces for that, until after trying “bignote” instead of “longnote”. And then I misinterpreted switching from “longnote” to “bignote” as the active ingredient that caused later paragraphs to stop disappearing.
As a reader, I’d find it quite useful to be able to jump back from the footnote to where I was in the main text. Not being able to do so slows me down, especially on long articles and when reading on an iPad (where going back to “find in page” every time is a bit annoying).
As a (just beginning to be a) writer, it’d be nice to have a footnote option pop up when I highlight text (like italics, linking, etc.), rather than having to go into markdown mode for that. (Or am I just missing the easy, WYSIWYG-mode way of doing footnotes?)
We already have a fix for the footnote backlinks at the bottom working again, which will probably be deployed sometime next week.
Agree that having footnotes in the WYSIWYG editor would be good. We are working on some editor improvements, though that one isn’t yet at the top of the list.