uwdata / living-papers

Authoring tools for scholarly communication. Create interactive web pages or formal research papers from markdown source.

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footnotes disappear when browser window is too narrow

joshuahhh opened this issue · comments

Footnotes currently appear in the margins, which is great. But if the browser window is too narrow (half screen width, mobile, etc) they disappear completely. It would be nicer if they appeared below the paragraph, or in an on-click popup, or something like that.

Flagging @TwoTau

What do you think about displaying the footnote next to the [x] reference when the margin collapses? For example,

Screenshot of article with footnote highlighted in blue, placed inline next to the reference.

I like footnotes to be always visible (or visible by default but collapsible) since showing footnotes on hover/click would make them less discoverable. But maybe hidden-by-default is okay for a space-constrained mobile view?

My current intuition is to hide footnotes by default. A footnote's role is to contain optional content, so I think reading it should feel optional. (The small-text approach might work if readers were accustomed to jumping over small text as they read, but I don't think most readers have this habit.)

@TwoTau: In case you haven't seen it, https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes is a fantastic resource for sidenote designs. I'd especially call attention to https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes#comparisons, which has "Mobile Fallback" & "Narrow" columns referring to the topic of this GitHub issue.