Footnote in footnote (markdown)

[Kedrigern]

Hi, I have text like this:

Lorem[^1] ipsum. 

[^1]: Footnote 1 text[^A]

[^A]: Footnote A text

and I would like to convert them into LaTeX.

I expect:

Lorem\footnote{Footnote 1 text\footnote{Footnote A text}} ipsum.

but I get:

Lorem\footnote{Footnote 1 text{[}\^{}A{]}} ipsum.

Replace letter (A) by number does not help.

I try markdown, markdown_github, markdown_mmd, markdown_phpextra, markdown_strict.

[jgm]

Pandoc's markdown doesn't support footnotes inside footnotes (which are an abomination anyway!).

[Kedrigern]

For example ReText editor (use python-markups, python-markdown) has this functionality.

I work with very complex scientific texts. Sometimes footnote inside footnote is important. For example translator's note inside author's note. Ofcourse in simple blogpost this is not necessary.

[Kedrigern]

BTW: MultiMarkdown inline footenotes does not work.

[jgm]

+++ Ondřej Profant [Apr 05 15 15:04 ]:

BTW: MultiMarkdown inline footenotes does not work.

Sigh. Looks like Fletcher added inline footnotes in 2013. Why couldn't he have used the same syntax as pandoc's inline footnotes, which we've had since 2007? Instead he uses a slightly different syntax, contributing to the mess of proliferating markdown syntaxes...

[jgm]

+++ Ondřej Profant [Apr 05 15 14:25 ]:

For example ReText editor (use python-markups, python-markdown) has this functionality.

I work with very complex scientific texts. Sometimes footnote inside footnote is important. For example translator's note inside author's note.

Footnotes inside footnotes don't work well with many of the output
formats pandoc supports. IN LaTeX, for example, you'd need to use an
external package to do this:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/23157/footnote-to-a-footnote

So, I'm not inclined to support this.

[lierdakil]

Not arguing that nested footnotes should be supported, but some manual
messing about with \footnotemark and \footnotetext should probably work
with LaTeX output. No need for external packages. It is, of course, ugly
and unintuitive.
​

2015-04-06 1:59 GMT+03:00 John MacFarlane notifications@github.com:

+++ Ondřej Profant [Apr 05 15 14:25 ]:

For example ReText editor
(use python-markups,
python-markdown) has this
functionality.

I work with very complex scientific texts. Sometimes footnote inside
footnote is important. For example translator's note inside author's note.

Footnotes inside footnotes don't work well with many of the output
formats pandoc supports. IN LaTeX, for example, you'd need to use an
external package to do this:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/23157/footnote-to-a-footnote

So, I'm not inclined to support this.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#2053 (comment).

[Jmuccigr]

Footnotes within footnotes? Who does that? Why do you even need it? The point of having a footnote is to get the note text out of the way when reading. If you're down in the footnote already, that functionality is unnecessary.

I think all I've ever seen is something like an inline ref: "See n. 5."

[lierdakil]

Footnotes within footnotes can be used to a comedic effect for literary
fiction, and as a way to put translator's notes w.r.t. a pre-existing
footnote. So it's not entirely pointless. However, it may be not worth the
considerable effort.

2015-04-06 21:00 GMT+03:00 John Muccigrosso notifications@github.com:

Footnotes within footnotes? Who does that? Why do you even need it? The
point of having a footnote is to get the note text out of the way when
reading. If you're down in the footnote already, that functionality is
unnecessary.

I think all I've ever seen is something like an inline ref: "See n. 5."

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#2053 (comment).

[Jmuccigr]

Interesting. Can you point me to something using it?

[lierdakil]

For one, Sir Terry Pratchett extensively used nested footnotes in his
Discworld series to an arguably great effect. I'm also pretty sure that
Chicago Manual of Style allows for nested footnotes in some particular
cases, but I can't quote from it, since I don't have a copy at hand.

2015-04-06 21:52 GMT+03:00 John Muccigrosso notifications@github.com:

Interesting. Can you point me to something using it?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#2053 (comment).

[Jmuccigr]

Googling a bit, most of what I find for nested footnote is on TeX pages (along with lots of "don't do it"). I didn't see anything for Chicago Manual, except for referring to one footnote within another, not creating a footnote within a footnote (which, again, I think is unnecessary, except for comic effect).

And apparently we should have cited this right away: https://xkcd.com/1208/

[lierdakil]

There are, however, a sizeable amount of tutorials on how to achieve nested footnotes in LaTeX and/or Word, so I gather that creating footnote labyrinths is a somewhat popular pastime. Never felt the need to use them myself though.

[Kedrigern]

As I have said. For example you need translater footnotes (or endnotes) in translated text. You have regular author footnote and translator need to tell you something.

Mentioned sir Terrry Pratchett using footnotes often and Czech tranlate contains many translator footnote in author footnote. (My experince)

[jjaderberg]

Danielewski's House of Leaves is another example from fiction of nested footnotes, but there they are not used for comic effect but are an indispensable structural component for telling a complicated story. The book is perhaps not a model of sensible typography, but it is very effective and was quite popular.

I'm not sure I see the need for these examples, however. I'm quite willing to take @Kedrigern at his word, and will not try to convince him that he doesn't need nested notes, really, or that he ought not to use them; I trust him to be the judge of that ;-)

With regards to what @jgm says about needing an external package for this, my impression is that this is true for most anything one does in latex. Looking at the default latex template for pandoc it seems several external packages are already relied upon (hyperref, fontspec, amsmath etc). I use bigfoot for notes, and have a conditional clause in my template that includes that package if a certain parameter is set in the YAML header of my document. It defines one or more new footnote series that I can use with latex commands in my markdown source. This is not exclusively for nested notes, but also very useful when one wants a different series of notes on the first page–dagger and asterisk symbols for author and 'thank you' notes, for instance–or elsewhere. They do work just fine, however, inside the footnotes of the default series that I type with pandoc-markdown syntax.

I do use nested notes a fair bit in my research. When I study an article or book closely I often recreate it as markdown/latex/pdf files. The default series of footnotes are then taken up by the notes from the original. I critique or expand arguments in the original work within my own foot- and margin notes, and insert hypertext links to other articles that I have "imported" or to my own writings, and sometimes this means notes within notes. I would not be able to work this way without nesting.

I am not necessarily pushing for support for nested notes in pandoc-markdown, however, if this seems complicated or undesirable for whatever reason–I can do what I want with latex commands in the markdown text. I'm quite content with nested notes being considered a marginal use case without any special support in pandoc-markdown. I do want to challenge the assumption that there is no meaningful use case for nested notes, and to suggest that it is possible already to achieve this with the bigfoot latex package and some minor tweaking to the template.

[Kedrigern]

@jjaderberg 👍 Thanks you, exactly what I thought.

Or maybe we can consider support for endnotes.

Footnote, endnote and citation are usual in research.