I'm using the org tufte ox-tufte and started tweaking the underlying tufte.css to my needs. It's really meant for org html export, not like the more elaborate org-to-latex Tufte formatting from org mode luminary Thomas Dye. As such, it gives you the Tufte look-and-feel with fonts and the famed sidenote/margin note feature -- all for just making a footnote (that appears beside its link in the text rather than the usual at the bottom of the page). The margin note capability is gnarlier in that it is just a link in the main text that then appears to the right of the main text

[[mn:1][Here is some text that will appear as a side column block]][[mn:2][And putting one right after the first one makes it look like a new paragraph]]

Obviously, this is a limiting factor on how elaborate and expressive these side columns can be, especially the margin note which has your content inside the link. However, the sidenote as a redirected footnote isn't too bad. Still, I'd like to be able to fully format what goes into a footnote without jumping through a lot of hoops. Here's an example of one footnote as sidenote that comes out looking okay despite the kludginess

[fn:1] Star chart for.... \\
\\
file:./images//Celestial_map_Hyi.png \\
\\
Just text for a few lines of text that is just meant as filler, not
anything important. Just here to show how text looks in a
sidenote. Cool, I think this is enough.\\
\\
~foldr :: (a → b → b) → b → [a] → b~ \\
~foldr f e [ ] = e~\\
~foldr f e (x : xs) = f x (foldr f e xs)~ \\
\begin{align*}
v = \frac{x}{t}
\end{align*}
[[https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:EPFLx+MatlabeOctaveBeginnersX+1T2017/home][MatLab and Octave training]]

For one, I couldn't get any sort of normal org block formatting (e.g., #+BEGIN_example...) for the code snippet to be recognized. Is there any sort of "normal" content formatting for org footnotes? Obviously, the worst is the margin note [[mn:... situation. That simply needs to be redone. But a margin note differs from a sidenote only because the margin note is not numbered. I tried the org-footnote-auto-label set to confirm, but it always reverts back to plain numbering.

Any ideas for improvement appreciated. This would be a really good-looking org html export option if it was bit more user-friendly.


Lawrence Bottorff
Grand Marais, MN, USA
borgauf@gmail.com