easier footnote hyperlinks?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1
  1. footnotes

am I missing something?* I tried many ways to insert hyperlinks format in a scrivener footnote. As a side note, I have not tried scrivener’s inline footnote’s appearing in the space I write doesn’t work for me.

After moving through dozens of attempts of what doesn’t work, I founding one that does. But it comes with multiple manual workarounds. The extra work comes from having to manually or via the use of a text app’s search and replace option, remove 4 \ from every hyperlink in the footnote that gets compiled.

It appears when I compile scrivener is adding these extra \’s.

Is there any way to get scrivener from doing so?

Or a better way of inserting hyperlinks into a footnote

here’s what is happening:

this hyperlink stops here

is compiled as

<a href=“http://www.google.com”>this hyperlink stops here</a>

which among other things extends the link to the entire rest of the footnote text that follows…

The above causes me to then manually remove the for /’s.

Is there an faster alternative that I have not yet tried?

*I am a non-writer, non-researcher, non-coder, business owner using scrivener many pre-writing gathering capabilities and writing environment to publish blog posts, LinkedIn articles, twitter postings and more…

the present environment this pertains to is the following app combo:
scrivener » text wrangler (to remove extra \’s and provide a copy from environment to past into wordpress with jetpack.com’s markdown wordpress text editor » draft » preview » publish workflow.

ˆ 1) keyboard combo command + control + link and the resulting standard link making
2) markdown hyperlink markup:
Google
http://google.com
3) dozens of other snippets found via google search and such

2

It would help to know what compile settings you are using, I think. I don’t quite understand why you are using raw HTML if your intended output is Markdown though. Why not just use Markdown in the document then?

Also it sounds like you might be using the option that converts all RTF to MultiMarkdown, it would be escaping your HTML, because the only reason to type raw HTML into an RTF file would be to print it for your readers. Hence the backslashes ensure your readers see the code.

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Thanks Amber. I appreciate the help…

I am using "compile for multimarkdown: option. The html is being used at this stage because I ran through standard markdown ways to display a hyperlink, and they didn’t work. (see ˆ2 footnote)

I am using the option to convert rtf to multi markdown. I started out with this option so i could get bold and italics to display in a footnote. thanks for the explanation as to why the backstrokes are being entered.

so to wind all this back…

the design focus is to be able to display in footnotes both/and:

  1. bold and italics
  2. hyperlinks with my title showing as in “click here” and now “http://www.google.com” and more…
4

Ah yeah, that option probably does a whole lot more than you want in that case—and that probably also explains why regular Markdown hyperlinks didn’t work either, again the option presumes if you type in brackets you mean them to be printed as brackets. It’s more for those not interested in using Markdown but they want access to some of the unique formats you get through MMD and Pandoc.

If you just want bold and italics, you could consider using styles for that and bind the styles to Cmd-B and Cmd-I in System Preferences: Keyboard: Shortcuts. As for how to get those compiling correctly, you would edit your compile format, go into the Styles pane, and add matching styles there, using the prefix/suffix fields to plug the asterisks in for you around text marked using those styles.

Then you don’t have to worry about any of this, and you can type into the footnote:

[click here](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/)

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Amber » an elegant solution! Thank you!

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I spoke too soon. when I tried using the newly created new character style “bold” that I bound to command + b, in the footnote area, I got a error sound and no bolding.

the reason I’m being so persistent is because of our unique multi-level writing style. You can see this with our popups at agnetic.com.

If I compile direct to html, footnotes render as tradtional footnotes that appear at the bottom of the page, and do not render with our signature inline popups. we we use bigfoot.js (bigfootjs.com) style’d popups/footnotes.

I’m open to other workarounds/paths…

otherwise I’m back to using the following combination:

  1. enabling the “convert rich set to multimarkdown” options in the compile area
    a) because it enables the following to show up correctly in scrivener’s editor and in the compiled mmd output’s main body area, but not the compiled footnotes:
    a) hyperlinks
    b) because it enables the following to show up correctly in both scrivener’s editor, the compiled mmd output’s main body and footnote areas;
    b) bold
    c) italics

  2. which leaves me with picking through the extra generated mmd 's so as to get hyperlinks to display correctly in the compiled mmd’s footnote area

  3. and sending in a request to have footnotes render via the “convert to rich text to multimarkdown” the same way the editor area does?

Amber, I too work in a ‘multi-relational environment’ like scrivener. So I appreciate the difficulties in developing code for an environment that has so many moving parts. I look for your direction to what I may be missing or need to try next…

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That’s a fair point. Styles don’t work in the relatively simplified formatting area of a linked footnote. Inline footnotes are the answer when you need full editor complexity inside of a footnote.

Or you could use Markdown. :slight_smile: Again I suppose a matter of taste, but one isn’t limited by what software lets you do, or is capable of letting you do, when you can type an asterisk anywhere at all. I’ve never had any problems doing all kinds of wild things inside of footnotes—but that’s because I type them in using something that requires nothing more than a raw text editor.

Meanwhile I’ll see if we can get hyperlinks resolving in footnotes (inline or linked). It appears the system tries to do so, but then fails and generates invalid MMD.

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Isn’t this an example where having the option to enable/disable escaping separately would help: viewtopic.php?p=254108#p254108 :stuck_out_tongue:

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Unless I misunderstand, I don’t really think so (they are fixing raw HTML in post, not Pandoc citations). More importantly, they would prefer to use hyperlinks, but are running into issues with these formatting tools generating invalid MMD syntax errors in footnotes, and have been trying to find workarounds that actually work.

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Ah, I only speed read through the OP and saw that the user wants to use markup (in this case raw HTML, but escaping doesn’t care where the bracket comes from), and the RTF>Markdown conversion. In this case if a user could toggle the escaping of “reserved” characters (< or [ etc.), without losing the conversion it would solve this case, but perhaps this author needs something else…

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Hi Amber & nontroppo,
First let me say that it’s a pleasure watching you to work together. It’s an impressive display of innovation at its best. Thanks.

thanks for you help on this topic » Amber has it spot on » for clarity below I respond to each point in the order it was presented:

∞ I’ve tested my use of Markdown » you are right it works ‘straight out of the box’ » I’ll leave off the “convert rich text to MultiMarkdown” option in the compile edit section » but for me doing so diminishes the Scrivener experience » that’s because I have tendency to twist/regroup the letters and numbers on the page » the keyboard shortcuts (bold, italics, hyperlinks are quite helpful in overcoming writing constraints.

» I appreciate you being proactive in seeing if the "convert rich text to MultiMarkdown" option extended to both footnote and inline footnote (inline footnote presents problems when displaying footnotes at the website  » I'm using standard wordpress for my website  » and the inline footnote's text doesn't stay contained within the popup footnote  » but I digress...

Indeed! Spot on!

Thank you both for your help! I’m finding a key benefit of moving off of conventional word processing apps (word, pages, etc.) and markdown apps is this community environment.

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You’re quite welcome. The basic problem itself with hyperlink conversion is very easy to reproduce and very obviously wrong, so that should be quite easy to fix for 3.0.2; fingers crossed.

You might look into installing a Markdown add-on to WordPress that can handle MMD/Pandoc style footnotes, rather than going to HTML directly. It could be that if it handles footnote syntax it might try to handle them more appropriately to whatever system WordPress uses, rather than what you get normally—which is just HTML formatting applied notes at the bottom of the content with a bunch of cross-referencing baked in.

There really is no such thing as a footnote in HTML. Until and if there ever is, conventions will continue to emerge from the collective desire for them no doubt, particularly from ePub quarters. It could be the kind of thing that gets better with time from the same source material. One reason I do like the Markdown approach is that the source material stays the same while the parsing and generation gets better as the years go by.

And yeah, smaller groups of people in a good community is a nice thing as well! We’re fortunate to have a good group of technical authors and users here. :wink:

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Thanks for the “a Markdown add-on to WordPress that can handle MMD/Pandoc style footnotes” recommendation. I’ll check into it.

It just dawned on me is another ‘level of rich text to MMD conversion’ I’ll be needing shortly: tables.

I was working on the formatting/hyperlinks first, before looking at how to use scrivener to help me show tables on my wordpress website.

While I can bump along using markdown for bold, italic and even hyperlinks, sitting here now, seeing what I see in regard what it takes to keyboard a table using markdown is like looking at a very tall wall with no ladder.

So I guess what I’m asking is when it comes to converting tables (in scrivener’s editor, not even I am crazy enough to try to present a table in a footnote…, or a least not yet :unamused: …) how well does the rich text to markdown option work on tables now?

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I certainly do agree with you on tables. :slight_smile: As much as I prefer using Markdown directly as a way of writing in general—tables are a bit of a mess. Granted, they are a mess in just about everything other than dedicated spreadsheets.

In fact both tables and bullet/number lists are things we support as independent options. Right below the full conversion option in compile settings, you’ll find a checkbox to Convert tables and lists to MultiMarkdown. I use it myself. Our table conversion is pretty good. RTF tables don’t really care what you do in the first row, but MMD tables require the first row to be a header. So just keep that in mind when formatting tables.

And yeah, it has its limitations, RTF tables can do a bit MMD tables cannot, and vice versa, but we did try to provide for as much overlap as we could. We did after all design this system for people generating ePub 3 and KF8 files—if you use those formats then you are technically using an augmented MultiMarkdown workflow. So we needed it to be as WYSIWYG-friendly as possible. That’s what it was invented for. Adding the capability as an optional checkbox to the MMD/Pandoc outputs was just gravy.

P.S. I just heard back from Keith, and the hyperlink bug will be fixed in 3.0.2.

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got it thank you

impressive!

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In my Scrivener » WordPress writing environment I recently came across a situation where that calls for putting a hyperlink into one of the main headings (Wordpress has up to six main headings). I tried to use Scrivener’s Edit > Add Link option, but it wouldn’t work in the title area of the document, only in the body…

As a work around, Amber, your “click here” code works just fine, for now. But getting this ‘insert link into Scrivener title area as well as Scrivener main editor area’ will help as I bring on others from our firm into using Scrivener for their blogging.

To that end, I’ll post such a request in the Wish List area of this forum. I thought I’ mention it here incase its not to late to squeeze into the upcoming 3.0.2…

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As for rich text formatting in the title area, I can say there are no plans for that, nor in the synopsis area. You would do best to plan your workflow accordingly, without an expectation of that changing.