Further comment on XWIKI-3897 'In exported PDFs, footnotes should be displayed at [...]'

Development
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I don’t know if, as an XWiki user and not developer, I’m allowed to open threads in this section, but I was commenting the Jira issue in the title when I had a doubt about whether what I was going to write would correctly fit there or should be discussed on the forum beforehand.

So here’s the other half of my comment entered at: Loading...

I found that issue while searching about the footnotes macro and gladly found that the behaviour I noticed had already been reported. Given what’s in that issue, I’d like to suggest the following.

I’ll only refer to PDF exports here, but that’s because I do not know all the XWiki export options, so there’s surely things I’m missing here.

What is currently implemented by the Footnote macro (and its compation Putfootnotes) is really endnotes: they’re rendered at the bottom of the XWiki web page and in the last page of a PDF export that results in several pages out of a single XWiki page (see How to Use Footnotes and Endnotes | Proofed's Writing Tips).

So, a new macro should be added, i.e. Put Endnote; it’s behavout should be the same as the current Footnote macro: a marker is added near the word where the note is entered and it’s content is shown (or printed) at the botton of the webpage (at the bottom of the last page in a PDF export).

This will automatically resolve almost all issues about footnotes misplacements etc. since nobody should expect to have a note at the end of the printed page if he entered an endnote - saying “almost” because I think notes could use little improvements - but that’s another thread (cough Footnotes putfootnotes print or PDF export cough :smiley: ).

And given that XWiki is not a layout / typesetting software, this could be enough: the Footnotes macro can be retired and footnotes are simply not supported.

Of course, supporting footnotes would be nice, but now their implementation can be more easily addressed, they can be marked wip / experimental etc. even depending on what Paged.js supports.

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Bump.

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@watery thx for commenting on the jira issue, that’s useful.

Thx for the link to How to Use Footnotes and Endnotes | Proofed's Writing Tips

Disclaimer: I don’t have the solution and I don’t know the topic well at all.

My opinion is that:

  1. we can’t remove the footnote/putFootnotes macros as that would break backward compatibility
  2. we could indeed imagine adding a putEndnotes macro, which, when used will replace the implicit putFootnotes macro. So that users can control the behavior they want.
  3. We could also not add a new putEndnotes macro and let the user decide on the footnote style as a PDF export option. It could make more sense than 2) since the difference of the two macros are only visible when exporting to PDF, and not when viewing the page (which makes it a bit weird).

We still need to implement both behaviors though, and the JIRA macro still needs to be fixed IMO.

Thx!

PS: I’ve linked the jira to this thread.

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