Footnote support in editor

I like to use footnotes for links or citations in my blog posts. I make it work with the markdown editor and I’d like to see it added to the new editor, Koenig.

In particular footnotes across Markdown cards. (Footnotes are currently only supported when the footnote reference and the footnote occur in the same Markdown card.)

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Manually created footnotes are currently supported in Ghost 2.0’s editor. As an example, you can type ^[1]^ to create superscript formatted text like [1] then you can select it and apply a link, eg. “#my-footnote”. Then at the bottom of your document you can have a HTML or markdown card containing the named links and formatted in any way you want.

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I was about to submit this issue :slight_smile:
(kind of bummed that it’s open since june :confused: )

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Oh, the answer to this idea is in another topic:

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Are there plans to support footnotes? Maybe a “notes” card?

Would we run into the same problem as with Markdown cards?

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Thanks for the workaround, but this actually isn’t a great solution for me. I liked the Ghost 1.0 automatic inclusion of footnotes, and almost every post in my blog utilizes footnotes for references at the end of each post. If there’s a better way to include references, I would be willing to use this, but I think this is blocking me from upgrading to Ghost 2.0 until there is a good solution for this without having to go through and manually change every blog post when I upgrade.

In terms of the cross-card support for footnotes, would it be possible to simply add support for footnotes that aren’t cross-card for now (i.e. identify footnotes as only being able to work within a single card), and push that implementation, so that existing blog posts that use this feature aren’t broken when upgrading from Ghost 1.0?

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You won’t need to touch any old posts when you upgrade. All posts created before 2.x use a single markdown card (markdown cards use the same editor as 1.x) so your footnotes will continue to work.

That’s already how 2.x works, this forum idea is about adding footnote support outside of the markdown card and/or support for footnotes across multiple markdown cards within the same post.

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Oh, my bad. Thanks for clearing that up.

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So if I’m reading this correctly the old markdown format to produce footnotes basically doesn’t work, and it is necessary to manually create the links? That is a major step back from what I can see.

I was just writing something up and I wanted three footnotes in a sentence. For the sake of argument I was writing many [^1] things [^2] are useful [^3] and this used to give me three nice footnote links. Unfortunately now it superscripts everything between the ^1 and the the s[ and doesn’t give me any links at all.

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Even opening up a markdown pane and attempting it all in there isn’t working for me, so I’m a little confused.

Have I just misunderstood something, or has that feature actually gone?

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There is no automatic footnote support in the rich-text editor, you need to create links yourself manually. You can create superscript using the format ^[1]^ which you can then add a link to if that’s how you want to format your footnotes.

Footnote support inside a markdown card is the same as it was in 1.x.

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While this is true, I wanted to modifiy my old post in order to use the new image cards, and I can’t on posts that also have footnotes.

Also, I’d rather avoid using a workaround if footnotes are going to be supported in a future version.

Thank you for your answers

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I hope that footnotes come back in the future. The footnote support used to be first class, and was very valuable.

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I don’t know what footnote support used to be like on ghost but I’m voting for it because footnotes are valuable to anyone who writes researched content.

FWIW, one of the best examples of WYSIWYG footnote support that I’ve seen in web-based editors is prosemirror’s example: ProseMirror footnote example

I really like that I don’t have to (1) keep track of markdown references to footnotes, (2) scroll to the end to find them, or (3) edit footnotes inline with the rest of the text.

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Agreed.

As for displaying footnotes, I also like the way Randall Munroe does it on “What if?”:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/153/

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I understand there is a workaround for footnotes using HTML page anchors and CSS styles but it seems to me we have taken a step backwards from automated support for footnotes (and it worked very, very well) to a manual method. I am all for upgrades and sacrifices for the greater good - Koenig. But as @jcuenod comments, footnotes are essential for researchers. My application is a genealogy blog and makes extensive use of footnotes, sometimes as many as twenty per post. So I express my concern for losing on this upgrade and implore the developers to reinstate a fully automated footnote solution.

Additionally, I am very confused as to why my posts created prior to 2.0 (with automated footnotes using markup) render properly in v2.6.0? Even when I create a simple block of markup in Koenig the footnote markup no longer works but the pre v2.0 posts do work. Maddening

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Would something like this be easier to implement?
La langue des signes française (LSF) | Cairn.info.

It’s in French, but you can see how they did “footnotes”: they are shown to the left and right of the paragraph where they are referenced.

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Yes, please prioritize this feature. It would be very helpful!

Without it, it defeats the purpose of having multiple cards in a post (which is also really useful!).

Every post I publish links out to external sources, and I want to be able to control the direction and flow of link juice, so not embedding as hyperlinks, and having them cited as static footnotes is amazingly useful.

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I have the same problem. Every post I’d like to change to use the new editor has footnotes :confused:

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Guys how are you suggesting that they add a feature for footnotes, when it’s already there? Like Kevin explained, you just use a superscript and then you can make a table of links at the bottom of the post?

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