Link to a footnote

[Calion]

Things I have tried

I searched “Link to footnotes” online and in this forum. I tried putting a carat in a link and scrolling down to find the footnote.

What I’m trying to do

Create links to footnotes. Footnotes are a semantic part of the document like anything else, and I want to be able to link to them, just like I would in a book: “See p. 24, fn. 3.”

But I don’t see any way to do that in Obsidian, other than, you know, just saying “fn. 3” without a hyperlink. But that’s so second millenium.

[robin0112358]

Method 1

The standard syntax for a footnote indicator in Markdown is [^fn1]. The footnote itself resides in the same document as the primary text. You’ll likely wish to put these at the end of the document. Preface each footnote with similar code, but with a terminal colon, e.g. [^fn1]:

In Read mode, these placeholders will be replaced with sequential numbers from 1, no matter what numbers you actually use. This makes it impossible to have numbering continue from one document to the next.

Method 2

However, there are other methods one can use in Obsidian, thanks to extended syntax that goes beyond standard Markdown. For example, one can link to a footnote in a document using a block ID with this code: [\[1\]](Footnotes#^fn-footnote)

Note that the square brackets must be escaped with a backslash in order to appear literally. In Read mode this appears as a nice floating window. The advantage here is that the anchor text can be anything you wish.

Well, almost. Oddly, I can’t get a superscript to work. The caret just appears, whether escaped or not. Try this code: [\[^1\]](Footnotes#^fn-footnote)

Method 3

You can also use transclusion to insert arbitrary blocks of text into the primary document, from the second document. Try this code: ![[Footnotes#^fn-transclusion]].

For the last two methods to work, the document “Footnotes.md” needs the correct block IDs in place. (These can be auto-generated, but that is a mess.)

Check out this demo:

Footnote How-To.md (1.5 KB)
Footnotes.md (536 Bytes)