I don’t really understand why the footnotes function like this:
Editor:

Reading:

All I want is for them to look the way the do in the Editor view with “custom” names, not automatically styled numerically (or ignored altogether). Is this possible? If not, why is it even formatted at all in the Editor view?
There are no whitespaces in front of the footnotes, it’s automatically formatted to look that way (I can track down the specific CSS snippets if needed). The only thing needed to reproduce this is basically just to make a footnote that isn’t a number. I could be wrong but I feel like it’s pretty self explanatory, I’m sure what other steps need to be described.
I’ve read the docs and see that this is just how markdown formats footnotes so what I’m really wondering is if there a workaround that anyone is familiar with (perhaps with CSS)
sorry, re-read my point #2 (edited), the issue isn’t whitespace, your footnotes aren’t formed correctly
And the confusion on whitespace is exactly why providing the textual input is helpful. It’s not obvious the whitespace is just styling.
I want my footnotes to be able to display “a.”, “note 1.”, “custom note.” etc. instead of just “1.”, “2.”, “3.” Is that just not possible?
it’s not possible using markdown footnotes; that’s how markdown footnotes work. If you want something else, markdown allows you to insert arbitrary html.