Awesome, I really think this feature will improve the quality of discussion here as it makes it much easier to note any caveats without having to break the flow of your writing. And I've always been too lazy to switch to markdown just to get footnotes working.
These are great - I’m writing a very long citation-heavy post right now and this feature arrived just in time! And the automatic renumbering already probably saved me an hour.
Having added them, though, they feel a bit big and heavy. I find my eye catching on them as I read, and my internal reading voice pausing when I arrive at them. My current solution is relegating the location of each footnote marker to the end of the sentence, which avoids the hitching but can be confusing: am I saying the whole sentence has a citation, or just the link in the sentence?
I’m currently reading this year’s physical essay collection, and they use a footnote style without brackets, and located at the bottom corner of the text instead of top corner (subscript instead of superscript). My eyes find this style less disruptive - the lack of brackets is probably the biggest part of that, with the sub-instead-of-super a smaller part. I would prefer this style on the site as well. Thought I’d mention it as something to consider - though it could be just a me thing. Either way they are great and thank you!!
That’s reasonable! I did nearly miss the first one from the physical book. Since my piece used them just to help readers years from now, when some of the URLs I linked to inevitably break, I wouldn’t mind readers missing them, but I get that that’s far from the only use of footnotes.
Thanks for doing this! I just learned that the EA forum uses the same framework under the hood as LW, is it open source? if yes, how can I spin up my own version of this?
This is excellent, thank you! I don't know of a solution to this problem, but FWIW it seems that webclippers somewhat break on these -- e.g. (1) Instapaper doesn't show the footnote number in the body of the text, only the footnote text at the end of the post; (2) Pocket shows the footnote number in the body of the text, but no where shows the footnote text itself.
Thanks again!
Awesome! I'd be happy to see old posts with footnotes edited to use the new format, either by the authors themselves or by admins.
Migrated one of my posts to use the new system. Very nice. Two more things I noticed:
- When there's a link to another post in a footnote it shows in the footnote hover preview, but when you hover over the link to the post there's no hover preview for the post.
- When I click the arrow to go back to the article from the footnotes it takes me up, then unhides the top bar which covers the footnote. My suggestion is either to make it take you a little higher so the top bar doesn't cover it, or make it not unhide the top bar.
Is this for posts, comments or both? ^1
- ^ Testing in markdown editor. ^2
- ^ Didn't seem to work. Switched to Draft-JS. ^3
- Nor in LessWrong Docs [Beta].
It is really annoying that if you use footnotes from the LW Docs Editor, and then switches to the Markdown editor, the footnotes get irrevertably messed up like this[[1]](#fnhqkg4lye79s)
-
**[^](#fnrefhqkg4lye79s)**
this is an example footnote
I noticed that footnotes don't seem to come over when I copy-paste from Google Docs (where I originally wrote the post), hence I have to put them in individually (using the LW Docs editor). Is there a way of just importing them? Or is the best workflow to just write the post in LW Docs?
What about adding support for something like this (footnotes and just notes? on the sides)?
I never realized how much wasted space there is.
Is this feature likely to be released in the near future?
I personally have a post sitting in drafts that is far too long to rely on footnotes, as it would break the reading experience. Sidenotes would be ideal for these kinds of posts, but it would be almost as good if you had an option to put them at the end of a paragraph in a little box or something, as that would translate well to the mobile reading experience.
I'm glad to hear that! I only just now realized that footnotes were also quite recently implemented.
This is excellent, thanks!
I see a minor bug with the hover view, e.g. in the second footnote of this post -- perhaps it has something to do with the whole footnote content being a hyperlink?
It is with great excitement[1] that I am pleased to announce that the main LessWrong text editor[2] now has support for footnotes![3] A huge thanks to our friends over at the Effective Altruism Forum who coded this one up.
You can insert footnotes via:
1. Manually selecting text in the text box and selecting insert footnote from the footnotes menu icon.
2. Using Markdown syntax
Footnotes will automatically renumber as you add and delete them!
What's more, footnotes will render with hover-over previews once published:
That's it. Go forth and create scholarly works!
I mean it, really. I've looked forward to us adding this support for years.
That is, the LW Docs editor, as distinct from the Markdown editor and legacy Draft-JS editor.[4]
The Markdown editor already had support for footnotes using Markdown footnote syntax.
Yes, footnotes can have footnotes. And those footnotes can reference themselves.[4]