Footnotes on Hypotheses

The insertion of footnotes is a function that can be very useful when publishing texts on Hypotheses that require the addition of secondary references and explanations. In order to display footnotes at the end of your articles and pages, several solutions:

Best practice: the double parenthesis system

To add footnotes to a text, simply open a double opening parenthesis, write the note, then add a double closing parenthesis, as below, taking care to leave a space between the text and the first opening parenthesis.

Which gives: My text¹

The numbering is then done automatically in your text and adapts automatically if a footnote is added. Clicking on the footnote number in the refers to the note, while clicking on the blue pictogram in square brackets at the end of the footnote takes you back to the location of the text that has been annotated.

Importing footnotes from a document

With the block editor, it is not possible to paste text written on word processing softwares such as Microsoft Word or LibreOffice without losing the footnotes created on the software. As long as it is still available on Hypotheses, it is possible to use the “classic” editor for this purpose. Note that the layout of the note differs slightly depending on the word processing software used, and that clicking on number of the note brings up the text that has been annotated.

We do not consider pasting text from word processing softwares without cleaning its formatting as a good practice. Indeed, the formatting of these texts results, once the text has been pasted into the WordPress text editor, in html tags in the content code that may conflict with the formatting you would like to add once in WordPress.

Therefore, if pasting text from word processing softwares is unavoidable, we recommend that you first clean the text before pasting the content into the WordPress text editor, so that its formatting on your Hypotheses blog will be made easier.

However, this cleaning also removes links that make footnotes imported from word processing softwares active.

Using the double parenthesis system in word processing softwares

The double parenthesis system is therefore the one that makes it possible to obtain both functional footnotes and, combined with the cleaning of imported text, the contents of articles and pages without imported html tags.

You can use the double parenthesis system directly when writing on the word processing softwares; the software will not interpret them as footnotes, but once the text is imported into your blog, cleaned and published, the footnotes will appear correctly. It is of course also possible to add them once the text has been imported and cleaned.

Choose a single system for a given content

In any case, it is a matter of sticking to one of the two methods for a given text: double parenthesis system or importing without cleaning text written on word processing software (with the “classic” editor). Indeed, the two numbering systems are not compatible: if the two footnote systems coexist on the same article or page, two sets of notes will be created, with two different numberings starting from 1 and with a different design.

Featured Image: Alejandro Cesarco, Footnote #7, 2008 by Andrew Russeth under Creative Commons BY-SA license.

1. Footnote. [↩]

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