I’ve updated a 2009 utility that lets you embed your end notes in the text you’re typing. The utility, Footnoter, extracts the endnotes, leaves a footnote number, and compiles a list of the endnotes with numbers and links. It now works with Markdown as well as with HTML; I use Markdown for most of what I write these days.

In other words, let’s say you type this in a document you’re creating with Markdown:

I write using Markdown. ((See John Gruber’s Daring Fireball for more.)) Markdown lets you embed formatting codes into plain text that are then rendered into formatted HTML, Word, etc.((The Marked app adds a viewer with export capabilities. It’s on sale for $9.99 right now.)), enabling me to focus purely on what I’m saying. It also lets me keep my fingers on the keyboard.

If you paste this text into Footnoter and tell it you want Markdown output, it will treat the comments between the double parentheses as endnotes. It will remove those comments from the body of the text, leaving the Markdown code for an endnote number, and will compile a list of endnotes with the proper references back to their endnote numbers. That is, it does what you would expect. At least with my limited testing.

For Markdown, that means the above text gets turned into this:

I write using Markdown.[^fn2] Markdown lets you embed formatting codes into plain text that are then rendered into formatted HTML, Word, etc.[^fn3], enabling me to focus purely on what I’m saying. It also lets me keep my fingers on the keyboard.

[^fn2]:See John Gruber’s Daring Fireball for more.
[^fn3]:The Marked app adds a viewer with export capabilities. It’s on sale for $9.99 right now.

Don’t be freaked out. That’s what endnotes look like in Markdown. When you run them through a parser, they’ll have appropriately numbered superscripts. (Footnoter generates arbitrary unique Markdown labels for endnotes; they start with “fn” and then have numbers appended sequentially. Those numbers have nothing to do with the number the parser will assign to the endnote itself. Also, yes, it’s a little bug that Footnoter starts with fn2 instead of fn1. Non-critical. I’m working on it. [Minutes later]: Fixed it. I think.)

The same thing happens if you are writing HTML except the markup that’s generated is more like this:

I write using Markdown.<span class=’fn_in_text’><a name=’fn2′><a href=#fnend2>2</a><</span> Markdown lets you embed formatting codes into plain text that are then rendered into formatted HTML, Word, etc.<span class=’fn_in_text’><a name=’fn3′><a href=#fnend3>3</a></span>, enabling me to focus purely on what I’m saying. It also lets me keep my fingers on the keyboard.

And that gets rendered in a browser as this:

I write using Markdown.2 Markdown lets you embed formatting codes into plain text that are then rendered into formatted HTML, Word, etc.3, enabling me to focus purely on what I’m saying. It also lets me keep my fingers on the keyboard.

There are a number of options, including setting the delimiters for endnotes and, for HTML, which endnote number to begin with. By default it removes the space before an endnote, so you can put a space between the word where the superscript should be and your delimiters, making your text easier to read when you’re working on it.

Also, if you work on a text, run it through Footnoter, work on it some more and add more endnotes, Footnoter should detect that and begin its arbitrary numbering of Markdown endnotes above where you left off. That means you can run it through more than once and it should still work.

Should.

Note: This code is from 2009. I’ve learned some stuff since then, including that jQuery makes life easier. When I added the Markdown option yesterday, I didn’t bother cleaning up the old code. It is particularly hideous. You can gape at its uglinesss at github.

PS: Yes, I really should have named it “Endnoter.”

Categories: misc dw