Re: Footnotes and org-export, revisited

[Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl>]

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Hi,

the result of this discussion about footnotes is now
in the latest git version, see

http://orgmode.org/Changes.html#sec-1.1.1

for more information.

- Carsten

On Dec 17, 2008, at 1:52 PM, Scot Becker wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I'm a new org user who recently ran across the video of Carsten's
> Google talk. I have been looking for something like org for years, but
> learning Emacs had always seemed too high a price, so I never really
> considered Emacs-based options.  However time is a teacher, and I see
> now that there are plenty of other higher prices than learning Emacs,
> which has anyway proved easier than I thought.  Org-mode is really an
> amazing piece of work, a highly original piece of software, and
> possibly just what this vim user needs. When I think how much time I
> spent other solutions, including vim's two (basically unmaintained and
> functionally feeble) outline modes, I can only resign myself to the
> mild shame.
>
> The following is in response to a brief thread posted to this list in
> October by Matthew Lundin.  He described the limitations of
> footnotes.el, and suggested two possibilities for extending footnotes
> support in org-mode. [1].
>
> The problem with Steve L. Baur's (otherwise useful) footnotes mode is
> that it cannot 'read' the contents of a loaded buffer.  So in any
> given editing session, footnote numbering always starts with 1, even
> if you already had 1...10 in your file from a previous editing
> session.  This is simply a limitation of the mode in its current
> state.  I expect the package's scope was originally confined to using
> footnotes in plain text emails, which are generally finished in one
> shot.
>
> There have been some efforts to overcome this limitation by means of a
> patch to  footnote.el [2] and a new function, footnote-init.el [3]
> which reads the contents of a newly loaded  buffer so that the patched
> footnote.el 'knows' about previously placed footnotes.  These
> particular patches may not have all the kinks worked out, however,[4]
> and are not part of the current CVS of Emacs 23.
>
> But someone working in Muse did write an interesting extension to
> Muse's footnote support. (The extension is explained here [5], and the
> revised version of the code is here [6]). It is basically a hook
> function which converts footnotes with reference names[fn:named_note]
> to plain, numbered footnotes, like Muse and org-mode support. It
> operates on a temporary buffer  just before export to LaTeX or HTML,
> so is transparent to the user.
>
> I too would like to make use of org-mode to do more extensive
> footnoting than the current footnote.el easily allows.  I'm not sure
> of the best solution.  Here are the alternatives I can think of:
>
> 1.  Help Baur's footnotes.el get to the point where it has no trouble
> with multiple editing sessions and managing the numbering of any
> arbitrary quantity of footnotes.  This is possible in theory.  But I
> suspect that footnotes associated with body text by simple Arabic
> numerals are pretty easy to mangle in a simple text system that lets
> you do arbitrary things with the text. Comments?
>
> 2.  Adapt the Muse code mentioned above for use with org-mode.  This
> would keep org-mode's current footnote support unchanged, but allow
> named footnotes while writing. Carsten suggested something like this
> in his response to Matthew.
>
> 3.  Add named footnote support to org-mode according to Matthew's
> second suggestion (similar to footnote functionality in Pandoc,
> Multi-Markdown or ReST). This could optionally include a function for
> the auto-generation of short (?) unique-ish IDs  to use instead of
> names (in a long document, giving named references to dozens of
> similar footnotes could itself be a source of confusion).
>
> 4.  Forget org-mode for anything with any quantity of footnotes.  This
> is Carsten's other suggestion in response to Matthew.  It's possible
> that the practicalities of footnote handling would prove too costly to
> get right.  He knows this much better than I.  (though I'm not sure
> that they impair org's plan-text readability as Carsten suggests.
>
> 5.  A final solution (which might also gain other advantages) could be
> to begin to facilitate an org-export mode to Pandoc's native
> plain-text syntax (an extension of Markdown).[7] Pandoc is a robust
> Haskell engine to convert between plain text formats.  This would add
> a step to org-mode export, but that one step could potentially allow
> conversion into the wide range of formats that Pandoc supports
> (markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, RTF, DocBook XML,
> OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, groff man pages,
> and S5 HTML slide shows). Pandoc's syntax model already has a lot in
> common with org's.  (Both allow LaTeX pass-through, for example).  I
> don't know if such an export would meet the effort vs. value trade
> off, but I suggest it might.
>
> Comments? (by anyone who summoned the patience to read all of  that...
> sorry for the length.  I couldn't manage less).
>
> Scot B.
>
> Footnotes:
> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/8373
> [2] http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.sources/browse_thread/thread/49c826201105d1e9/7c3ea8323041f91c?lnk=gst&q=footnote#7c3ea8323041f91c
> [3] http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.sources/browse_thread/thread/e809fa5d396a7aa2/1d001b35388725b4?lnk=gst&q=footnote#1d001b35388725b4
> [4] http://osdir.com/ml/emacs.muse.general/2007-11/msg00012.html
> [5] https://mail.gna.org/public/muse-el-discuss/2007-11/msg00027.html
> [6] https://mail.gna.org/public/muse-el-discuss/2007-11/msg00033.html
> [namednote] Like this.
> [7] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
>
>
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