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Markdown footnotes

A footnote is a marker in the text and a definition somewhere else in the file. The renderer collects the definitions, numbers them and puts them at the bottom with links back.

A footnote

Markdown was designed in 2004.1

Footnotes

  1. By John Gruber, with Aaron Swartz on the syntax. ↩
Named, and with several paragraphs

Nothing is uploaded.1

Footnotes

  1. The parser runs in the browser.

    Indent continuation lines by four spaces.

    ↩

What usually goes wrong

  • Not part of CommonMark. GitHub, Obsidian and most static site generators support footnotes; chat apps and simple renderers show the brackets as text.
  • The label is an identifier, not the number. Renderers number footnotes in the order they appear in the text, so [^1] can come out as 3.
  • A definition with no matching marker renders nowhere, silently.

Where it behaves differently

It renders as written on GitHub, GitLab and Obsidian. Everywhere else in this table it does something else, and that is worth reading before you paste.

PlatformBehaviour
VS Code previewIts documentation does not say, so neither do we.
NotionNot supported. The syntax arrives as its own punctuation.
DiscordNot supported. The syntax arrives as its own punctuation.
SlackNot supported. The syntax arrives as its own punctuation.

Related

For the .md file that arrives in Mail

A markdown file on a phone is the worst case: no editor, no preview, and a share sheet full of apps that want to import it into a library. The iPhone and iPad app opens it where it landed, renders it, and lets you edit and save it back.

Soon on theApp StoreDigital Sandbox, who are building it →

For iPhone and iPad.