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30th June 2026

I've been making some good progress in creating the new extensions infrastructure in Orsn, which will replace the old plugin system with npm packages.

For some light relief I returned to the main text editor and added a couple of new features which I think will be useful, footnotes and references.

Footnotes

Footnotes already exist in GitHub Flavoured Markdown (GFM), so I have implemented those using the existing syntax. They look like this in Markdown:

Here's my text with a footnote.[^1]


---
[^1]: Here's the text of the footnote at the bottom of the page.

And in HTML, this is translated to:

Here's my text with a footnote.^[1]

In my WYSIWYG editor, I can add some useful related interactions and automated features such as ordering and updating. See video below.

References

There is no standard Markdown feature for References / Bibliographies, however. I could have implemented these in plain text but I wanted to add more value than that: there should be the convenience of linking between an inline citation (like '(Benjamin, 2015)') and the full reference text, for example.

For that to work, I used Markdown links for the citation part (Author, year), and embedded HTML for the full reference text at the bottom of the page. That is valid Markdown, and it allows me to style the separate parts of the reference (author, title, publisher, place) differently, and perhaps in future to offer a range of formatting options from the most common bibliographical layouts (AAA, Chicago, etc.).

It's a reasonable compromise having HTML for the reference section as the entries won't need much, if any, manual editing. For the moment, references are pulled in from Zotero, using either a web account or a local instance of the desktop Zotero software. It should be straightforward to add other providers in future as required.

Imported references are not tied to the Zotero account, and won't reflect any updates to the refs in Zotero. However, we save their ids in the Card Markdown, so there could be an option to refresh their contents after we've made updates in Zotero.

Contact

Find me on the fediverse (Mastodon) @Lemmy@post.lurk.org, or send an email to: info [at] orsn.io