Hello. I am using “Sync with external folder” as described here to write an academic paper in a plain text editor. The folder I am syncing contains a set of markdown files, all of which will ultimately be compiled via Scrivener to markdown (then converted via Pandoc to Word and PDF).
In my plain text editor, I write numbered footnotes like [^1]. Each individual plain text document has numerous footnotes, and in each file, the footnote numbering starts from 1 again. Upon compilation, these replicated footnote numbers obviously cause problems in Pandoc. And since the whole point of syncing with Scrivener is to use it as an outliner and often rearrange the order of sections, the footnote numbers become impossible to track and manage.
I wanted to ask how people who write in external editors like this handle numbered footnotes?
I know I could use inline footnotes. But I work in the humanities, and sometimes footnotes contain multiple paragraphs, which is only possible in numbered footnotes. (And since sometimes footnotes are long, I like to separate the footnotes from the body.)
I suppose it depends on the editor you are using,[1] and whether you need to use whatever conveniences it affords for adding footnotes (or if it has configuration), but it’s good to know that Markdown footnote conventions do not, and I would say ideally should not, be numerical. When I create a footnote outside of Scrivener, I do so like this.[^docs-SomeTopic]
[^docs-SomeTopic]: Refer to BlahBlahBlah in the user manual PDF.
That is way more useful to me on both ends of it (particularly if I keep all of my bookmarks at the end instead of somewhere closer, like after the paragraph here. That’s my opinion of course, I use footnotes like salt whereas you probably use them like grain, and maybe coming up with names is too much. If so, you might consider a simple prefixing system to avoid such conflicts, based on the section name. If the section is called “Footnotes in Markdown”, then the first footnote within it could be [^FIM1].
In Sublime Text, I use the MarkdownFootnotes plugin, which does by default go with numbering, but gives you the opportunity to type in your anchor name first, before typing in the footnote text. It’s a very nice plugin, if you use that editor. ↩︎
This is a very practical solution. Even if the section title changes, a quick search-and-replace makes quick work of it. I am so conditioned to consecutive numerical footnote numbers, that something so obvious didn’t occur to me! Many thanks as always, Ioa.