Make footnotes in embedded pages work

[Folkemunne]

Use case or problem

I have a whole lot of poetry and the like where individual stanza will have explanatory foonotes, like so:

36. ^[1] Better a house, | though a hut it be,
    A man is master at home;
    A pair of goats | and a patched-up roof
    Are better far than begging. ^36

37. ^[2] Better a house, | though a hut it be,
    A man is master at home;
    His heart is bleeding | who needs must beg
    When food he fain would have. ^37

I will sometimes embed individual stanza in other notes by using ![[Hovalmal#^37]]. Right now, those embeds will include the number of the footnote where I’ve tagged it, but it won’t be formatted as such or include a link, it’ll just be the number in plaintext, giving me a line like “37. 37 Better a house, | though a hut it be,”.

Proposed solution

Preferably, format the footnote as you would normally, and have it link to the relevant footnote on the original page.

Alternatively, include the relevant footnote on the new page by grabbing the text of any footnotes discovered within the relevant passage, and adding them either to the new page or within the embed itself.

Alternatively-alternatively, remove the link text entirely, so that I don’t end up with the line “37. 37 Better a house, | though a hut it be,”, but instead get “37. Better a house, | though a hut it be,”.

Any of these solutions would be preferable to how it currently works, but the first would be the best since it would keep the functionality of the footnote while minimising clutter.

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1. The manuscript has “little” in place of “a hut” in line I, but this involves an error in the initial-rhymes, and the emendation has been generally accepted. ↩︎

2. Lines I and 2 are abbreviated in the manuscript, but are doubtless identical with the first two lines of [[#^56|stanza 56]]. ↩︎

[Folkemunne]

Updating this to note that if you use a long-form footnote, as such ^[1] then embedding the stanza does include the footnote in the embed.

I.e.

1. “Go now, Skirnir! | and seek to gain
   Speech from my son;
   And answer to win, | for whom the wise one
   Is mightily moved.” ^[2] ^1

looks like this when embedded:

However, this makes the markup really ugly, and I can’t have footnotes of more than a single line.

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1. footnote here ↩︎

2. My son: both manuscripts, and many editors, have “our son,” which, of course, goes with the introduction of Skathi in the prose. As the stanza is clearly addressed to Skirnir, the change of pronouns seems justified. The same confusion occurs in stanza 2, where Skirnir in the manuscripts is made to speak of Freyr as [fp. 108]“your son” (plural). The plural pronoun in the original involves a metrical error, which is corrected by the emendation. ↩︎

[Duo]

Since now (2024.01.22), is there a solution already?

[Pummelfisch]

Yea I would also be interested in this feature, since I’m using a lot of embedds and sometimes also footsnotes.
For now on I’ll stick to the propesd workaround of long-form footnotes.

[noahela]

I think all your proposed solutions are great! The “Alternatively-alternatively” solution is not 100% optimal, but it might be the quickest to implement … and a huge upgrade compared to how it is right now!

[MilaMila]

This issue drives me insane, it’s the only thing needed to be fixed in my workflow.

I subscribe to obsidian sync to support the development a little bit, but is there any way to support the fix of this issue specifically?

[noahela]

Someone got any news to this? I tried to find a way to fix it with an add-on or custom CSS, but wasn’t successful with it. So it’s still VERY annoying. Do you guys think it would be at least possible to fix with an add-on or user CSS?

[Macaroni]

What are these “long-form” footnotes ? Anything to do with the Longform plugin ?

I found this Reddit on Longform & footnotes, but doesn’t seem to handle the same question exactly…

it seems the obsidian community isn’t much focused on literature so if we want a fix we’ll have to provide for it ourselves…