Footnotes are not rendered in Live Preview mode

What I’m trying to do

Trying to get Footnotes that are not nested in Tables/Callout to render in Live Preview mode.

Searching around, Footnotes are currently not supported in Callouts and in Tables.

Can Obsidian not render Footnotes that are not nested in Tables/Callout in Live Preview mode?

Things I have tried

The example from the documentation is:

This is a simple footnote[^1].

[^1]: This is the referenced text.
[^2]: Add 2 spaces at the start of each new line.
  This lets you write footnotes that span multiple lines.
[^note]: Named footnotes still appear as numbers, but can make it easier to identify and link references.

I pasted it into the sandbox vault. The footnote will not render in Live preview, only in reading mode.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I forgot to mention, I am on obsidian Version 1.5.3 and on windows 11.

I do believe you need to actually make a reference to the footnote for it to be rendered. So try that, and report back if it’s still a problem. But I might misunderstand your issue…

1 Like

I am fairly new to this “Footnate” notation and its syntax. What do you mena when you say:

I do believe you need to actually make a reference to the footnote for it to be rendered

Is it incomplete in my example? I copied and pasted that from the documentation, unless I messed it up or missunderstood them. Thanks.

This is the normal behaviour. The footnotes are only rendered in reading view, whether in the body or in tables or callouts.
If you want a link in live preview mode, you can use a link to a block : Internal links - Obsidian Help

2 Likes

I am having the same issue. The footnotes do not work at all regardless of the view. The footnotes render properly but they do not change the focus. The text line [^1] just renders to 1 but does not link to the footnote reference. The reference [^1]: behaves as a link in that it changes the cursor to the hand but it does change focus.
This behavior occurs with and without community plugins.
Windows 10 Pro
Obsidian v1.5.8

If they don’t work in Reading View then it’s a different problem and you should post a new thread for it.

1 Like

Footnote number two and the named footnote, which weren’t showing up in reading view, were never referenced in the note text. I believe that this example in the docs is not a full example, but only shows the footnotes themselves - to illustrate various ways to format footnotes.

For a full example, those footnotes should also be referenced in the text:

Obsidian_fJp7zZbOwz