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davidgiven / wordgrinder

A word processor which gets the hell out of your way and lets you get some work done.
http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder
974 stars 61 forks source link

Feature request: footnoting/endnoting capabilities #80

Open gflatlydian opened 5 years ago

gflatlydian commented 5 years ago

This is an amazing piece of software, and the kind of thing I have been looking for for a while. The last thing it would need is some sort of footnoting capability to allow for me to do more academic writing in this program. I know this could be done with inserting inline LaTeX commands but I think a more elegant solution that makes the footnote less distracting would be more in line with the "get out of the way" text processing philosophy.

davidgiven commented 5 years ago

I've thought about this, but it's pretty hard --- footnotes are really sequences of paragraphs, meaning they can't be embedded into flowing text like a character style, but can appear inside paragraphs, meaning I can't just create a 'footnote' character style.

One thing I've been mulling is a 'link' character style, which could be used to refer to text in other subdocuments. These could then be exported as footnotes depending on the type of link. The problem is it would require a certain amount of manual management, which isn't very satisfactory.

gflatlydian commented 5 years ago

The way I thought could work would be to have the footnote symbol character style simply have a reversed background, then have a separate screen that contains the footnotes. In the main text you'd only have the stylised number, then the content of the footnote would be edited in the footnote pane/menu/screen/window.

I wish I was actually capable of coding so I could have a crack at it haha

davidgiven commented 5 years ago

Thinking about it some more, it wouldn't actually be that hard. There are plenty of bits in the encoding left for more character styles, and the same construction would be useful for other things. Hmm...

davidgiven commented 4 years ago

We've had another request for this. It'd be doable, using the mechanism outlined above, but I think it's out-of-scope for the next release. It also wouldn't be very satisfactory regarding the user experience, so it needs some more thought.