Footnotes in markup and Emacs

In classic Emacs fashion, there are three incompatible implementations of footnotes:

• Org Mode,
• footnote.el,
• and Markdown Mode.

The implementation in footnote.el is primitive, and seems regrettably limited in its scope for customisation.

Org Mode is a full-fat idiosyncratic markup language so it’s fine for that to have its own footnote syntax.

The Markdown Mode I linked is actually not even in the GNU ELPA, so it would be unreasonable to complain about its creator not making use of footnote.el, especially since that doesn’t seem to have the capability to easily adapt to Markdown’s footnote syntax.

That was my main revelation that prompted this post: Markdown has a standard footnote syntax!¹ It seems to be supported by pandoc, at the very least.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work very well with my blog post system, as you can see, so I doubt I’ll be using these very much.

Pandoc also supports declaring footnotes inline, like in LATEX, which I think will be easier to manage², since it doesn’t rely on special Emacs key-bindings to use.