Wonkish: Obsidian Footnotes As Sidenotes
Wonkish: Obsidian Footnotes As Sidenotes
Following in Edward Tufte's footnotes, er, footsteps.
Tufte’s Sidenotes
I have wanted for some time to have Obsidian footnotes displayed as sidenotes in the style advocated by Edward Tufte, as shown, here:
I’ve tried a variety of hacks from the Obsidian community, but they are inadequate. I have simply come to act as if someone at some point will implement a plugin or a tweak to a theme to implement them. So I have simply started to use footnotes regularly under the assumption that a glorious day is coming when they will be realized.
This post is simply a description of my wishlist for how they might be realized, and a few comments as to how they sort of work for me in the interim.
How It Might Look
Here’s a mock-up of what Tufte sidenotes might look like. First, a fragment of an Obsidian file, where I have at the top a footnote at the end of a task, and another at the end of the last paragraph.
The task is quite elaborate. The first characters — `- [>]` — mean that this is an in-process piece of work, probably heavily annotated. The Dataview in-line attributes — `[ø:: work futures] [øø:: #work/human-centered]` — allow me to find this task through various search techniques. The segment that starts`| Talha Khan`, is how I indicate a list of authors. At the end of the author list I have a footnote:
^[but this #organizations/mckinsey piece is much more general, touching on emergent leadership (they call it agile^[agility is not the defining characteristic: should be a post]), purpose, and the shift to people operation from HR (although they don't call it that)]
That footnote includes an embedded footnote: `agile^[agility is not the defining characteristic: should be a post]`.
Here’s how this might be rendered in a sidenote implementation:
A Short Digression: Nested Footnotes Sort Of Work, Today
It’s an interesting fact that nested footnotes sort of work, today. Here is the list of footnotes for the entire file in Obsidian reading mode today:
Note that the nested footnote appears in a second tier at the bottom.
A curious problem is that these second-tier footnotes render as shown, but the footnote links and the return links for the second tier (`↩`) don't work. So for now, it's just sugar. (In my case, I read them in edit mode, so it doesn't matter much, since I don't rely on the footnote links in that case.)
Meanwhile, back at the main thread about sidenotes, there are a number of observations I would like to share:
I could be using other mechanisms to accomplish at least some of what I would like to see with sidenotes realized from footnotes. Instead of footnotes, someone might place the content in another file and display it as a tranclusion. But I think that just creates too many files, and the context for the content should be close to the material commented on.
Much of what I am hoping to see for sidenotes here, as informational objects for the benefit of the reader (in this case just me), could be used as a pattern for comments used in cooperative editing, as in Google docs and other tools. Footnotes could include the identity of the author, and nesting of footnotes could represent a discussion thread, as in this case:
If people start to use footnotes/sidenotes in this way it would be helpful to be able to reference them and link to them, for example to transclude a footnote from another file, or to edit in the Hover editor.
Since I have been using footnotes a great deal, I have started to occasionally place tasks in them. In today’s Obsidian, tasks have to start as the first series of characters on a line for purposes of rendering and for searching via dataview. However, since I also rely on core search (and the Query Control plugin) to search for tasks as strings of text, I can find the ones defined in footnotes, like this:
line:("- [!]" "[ø:: work futures]" "[øø:: #economics]")
Basically, I don’t see why Obsidian tasks have to start at the first character of a line: it’s too limiting. Maybe tasks could be defined so they start at the first character of an addressable context, like the start of a footnote.
Conclusion
I am sure that someone will straighten out sidenotes someday, as an additional side column in any file that has footnotes. We might see it as an addition to a theme, like Minimal, or as a CSS snippet, or a plugin.
But I’m sure it’s coming. And please make it soon.