Re: Soft return in footnote text?

[Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com>]

On 3/12/18, Lawrence Bottorff <borgauf@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm getting carried away with a footnote and want to have it be many
> paragraphs long when I export it to HTML. I can put in latex math formulae,
> and that breaks things up. But is there a way to simply have separate text
> paragraph in an org-mode footnote?

footnotes can be separate or inline.  i think you are using inline.

inline is really good because it keeps the thing referred to with the
thing that is referring to it.  this shared locality helps prevent
footnotes from getting out of sync due to edits.  for this reason, i
use inline footnotes exclusively.

i too use multiple paragraphs in inline footnotes.  in principle, i
think you can use \par or something like that, but that's ugly.  your
idea of soft newlines is really interesting.  i don't recall their
behavior, so i can't answer.

this might be what you are doing?  i much prefer it:

ad faksdn kfsd kfjans kdfn kasdfn kasf kasf [fn::first par

second par.] rest of same paragraph.

however, org no longer supports this directly as of the new org parser.

what i do is use a filter function, which uses the new parser.  this
is slightly modified from something nicolas posted.

  (add-hook 'org-export-before-parsing-hook 'my-org-export-par-in-inline-fn)
  (defun my-org-export-par-in-inline-fn (backend)
    "Fix inline footnote paragraphs."
    (with-no-warnings
      (unless (org-export-derived-backend-p backend 'latex)
        (org-footnote-normalize)
        ;; =alpha i guess it sticks \par in there for you
        (while (re-search-forward "\\\\par\\s-*" nil t)
          (replace-match "\n\n")))))

this works for me.  it restores the previous behavior that i like.

the future concern is fontification.  currently this works perfectly.
however, if the org fontifier starts using the new parser, and does
not accommodate this style, then the inline footnote will not be
fontified correctly.  this has not occurred.

if such a future fontifier accommodates this style, no problem.

dunno if soft newlines for inline footnote paragraphs could fix that
or be possible.

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