Feature Request: Footnotes

[alexdryden]

Many of our scholarly publications that use Scalar have a need for footnotes. For several years we have been offering authors a html/css recipe that a GA devised for handcrafted footnotes, but this solution has proven to be error prone and tedious. So I developed a CKEditor plugin for inserting footnotes (adapted from this).

I'm opening this issue to see if you'd have any interest in taking a look at a pull request for the feature.

If you'd like more info on the need for this feature that we've found among the scholars we serve, the digital publishing specialist on our team @maryborgoton can better speak to that.

[eloyer]

Hi @alexdryden , thanks for reaching out on this — would be happy to take a look at a PR. And yes, we'd be interested in hearing more from @maryborgoton about the needs you've been addressing. Footnotes are a frequent request, but one that ends up being tackled by authors in a variety of ways, with good reasons behind each approach that have probably stymied development of a single solution.

[alexdryden]

Sounds great @eloyer. I'll be out on vacation for the next week, but when I get back I'll finish incorporating some feedback from our beta testing and put together the PR. And I'd be really interested to see some of the other solutions folks have come up with.

Having a footnotes solution upstream is important enough to our org that I would be more than happy to help iterate a final solution if the added bandwidth would be helpful.

[mat-k-witts]

I have been thinking of writng a Zotero plugin for a while now based on something here. Not sure.... I keep flip flopping about doing it...

[maryborgoton]

Hi @eloyer! Thank you so much for having a look at this when you're back in the office. We have a high demand for footnotes in monograph-length works and in a journal publishing with Scalar through the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN). Beyond IOPN, I used a similar HTML/CSS solution in my dissertation Right now, authors have to cut-and-paste HTML into the source view, which has meant that they have had to manually add numbers as they go along. It gets really messy when they have to insert a new footnote as they edit the prose or when they have to modify the footnotes themselves. Many of our authors are new to HTML/CSS, so having to learn the structure of the code and how to implement it has increased the time it takes for them to learn the platform. This also lengthens the time it takes to complete the manuscript and to perform a technical review before publication. We've also encountered situations where readers who are new to Scalar misjudge the scholarly rigor of the book because the content of the citations is on another page, so our authors have been adopting footnotes as a means to make it easier for readers to discover and review footnote content.

@alexdryden 's footnote solution fits in elegantly with the current editorial view and is very intuitive to use. It adjusts the numbering as authors revise the prose, eliminating some of the typos that inevitably occur when editing HTML. The footnotes it creates are accessible, and the content of the citations is displayed on the same page as the prose content. Having an upstream solution for this would encourage other authors to adopt accessible approaches to footnote content and streamline the writing process.

[jwr12]

Hi @eloyer ! I also would like to thank you for looking into this, as I think it would be a really great idea! The Scalar Note and Annotation functions are handy for some things, but as Mary and Alex have said, they aren't ideal for all scholarly functions. I run a student-based digital documentary editing program that uses Scalar as its interface, and since citation rigor is really important to our audiences (and the sort of documentary work we're doing) it's important that we be able to use a lot of citations (which is cumbersome to organize as Scalar annotations) and also meet audience expectations (which, for good or ill, generally means footnotes at the bottom of the page, numbered). Having a neat way of doing footnotes would be a life saver : we literally have to add about a week to class to walk students through the basics of html so they can, using our scripts, hand code notes.

Thanks so much for considering adding this footnote functionality!!

John Randolph

Editor, SourceLab

[eloyer]

Thanks @maryborgoton and @jwr12 for your thoughts, and appreciate your willingness @alexdryden to contribute dev time to this. It's clearly a need -- once we've had a chance to review the pull request we can give more substantive feedback.

[DerDoktorFaust]

Hello @eloyer I wanted to advocate for developing greater footnote support along with @jwr12 and @maryborgoton ! It would be a major boon for academic publication and especially for current and aspiring digital humanists. It would help propagate work to a wider audience, but also ease learning the platform (which would spread its use as well).

Thank you for considering this!

[Rhiannon-Hein]

Hi @eloyer! Like @cgoodwinDH, @maryborgoton, and @jwr12, I wanted to voice my support for a footnote button. One of DH's tenets is accessibility and usability for a wide audience, and the footnote button would make the use of scalar more approachable for digital publication on the platform. Thanks so much for your consideration!