Do any of the text processors support footnotes? I’m a historian and that’s absolutely critical (and it can’t be markdown style – I’ve tried and it just bugs me). That’s the only non-basic text processing feature I need and it’s kept me on Pages or Word for quite a long time.
Since your question is about text processors and not Nisus it probably deserves a separate thread, but with regard to Markdown text editors specifically, some ‘flavors’ (but not the original format) support footnotes, including Ulysses, IA Writer, Mou and others.
Thanks! But NOT Markdown, please.
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Hi Silbey, I’m puzzled by your remark. In my experience Nisus has always handled footnotes and endnotes well.
I’ve just published (in a tiny local historical newsletter) 5,000 words, with comprehensive endnotes, all composed in Nisus Writer Pro and exported to DOCX.
As for Pages, I struggled to convert footnotes to endnotes—got there eventually but found the interface uncongenial.
My simple needs were once met well by Mariner Write and I mourned its passing. I would join a Kickstarter campaign to keep NWP running.
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Like I said, this deserves its own thread, presumably with more details on what you’re looking for. (Markdown is just text but if you’re opposed to that please make it clear in your question if you start another thread.)
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Mellel has good footnote support, but it is Very Different, and has a bit of a learning curve.
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Mellel’s (www.mellel.com) support for long footnotes and very long documents is the best. I’ve used it for decades. (I’m not affiliated with Mellel, just a user.)
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Ask and @ace shall provide. And I did mention in my first comment that I’d prefer not markdown.
Yeah, I didn’t really explain well in the first comment. Nisus, Mellel, Word, and even Pages fit into the “kitchen sink” style processor-of-verbiage. I need very little of the kitchen sink stuff except robust citation handling and so I found that style annoying but unavoidable. I used Word for a long time because it does what I need it to (and oh so much more) and it was compatible with publisher processes. I tried Nisus and Mellel as well, but neither of them had a clear advantage over Word (for me, specifically) and they had the kitchen sink issue as well. When Pages got reasonable docx export, I switched to it. It did everything I needed and was less kitchen-sinky. I used it for quite a while but then got tired importing things in and out of it, though, so I switched back to Word and pruned it back mightily to reduce the bloat a bit. This is my tool bar in Word:
It’ll do for the moment.
What I’d really like is a non-kitchen-sink, bare-bones text processor that nonetheless does footnotes (not in markdown) and shows them on screen as Word does (ie, with a superscripted marker and the footnote at the bottom) with automatic renumbering, etc. Kitchen sink stuff just gets in my way.
I know this is highly specific and persnickety…
What’s with the obsession with footnotes? I’ve never been a fan. In print form they are ugly and difficult to read and follow, and nine times out of ten they don’t add value, just distraction. (I will follow one and most of the time it’s just a source reference or irrelevant side topic which I find an irritating waste of my time.)
In digital form they can be hidden until viewed, which is helpful, but I still don’t see why they can’t just be inserted as a parenthetical. (If they are too long, a sidebar is more appropriate.)
Aren’t footnotes (and indexes) archaic technology that should be abandoned in the digital age? Or is the need solely for academic use where it might be required by out-of-date institutions?
Just curious.
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For a 400+ page technical book, I specifically chose Mellel for its excellent support of footnotes (and cross-references). As a long ago user of FrameMaker it was delightful to have a tool that makes serious book writing easy.
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Not sure if useful or not. There is a web page / wiki dedicated to text editors that has a long list of editors, for different purposes and platforms, since the 70s. From reading it, most of them are for developers and there are many who does not exist anymore… there is a section on “Word Processors” and another on “Mackintosh Editors Family” TextEditors Wiki: HomePage
Footnotes essentially are hyperlinks within printed media. They can be overdone, but personally, I love them.
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I’m a professional historian, as I mentioned in the original post. Whatever your profession, think of the fundamental tool that you must use. There you go, that’s the equivalent.
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It all depends on one’s needs. We used MS Office until we retired in 2012 and then switched to Apple’s Pages et al. Works for out needs so no need to pay MS for anything.
I used FrameMaker too before Adobe destroyed it. I think that’s what felt comfortable about Mellel when I first started using it.
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This discussion is reinforcing my decision to bite the bullet and learn LaTeX. I’m not being held hostage to deprecated document formats, abandonware software, and anything other than plain old text editors or public domain TeX specific graphical editors. And I’m not locked into platforms - I can take the same source and work on Mac, Windows or Linux. I get the same output on each one from the same source.
I also can do revision control on my text file content using Git (and have it make sense and be able to use textual diffs to compare versions).
Features? Tables of contents, check. Tables, check. Figures, check. Long documents, check. Footnotes and endnotes, check. Hyperlinks, check (both within the document ant to external URLs). Bibliographies, check. Mathematical formulas, check. Plus lots of other stuff I have yet to need. And I get a very professional looking typeset output.
Ok it’s not WYSIWYG, but rather YCGEWYW (you can get exactly what you want). The speed with which the typesetting can be done within the TeX system (which is integrated with those TeX graphical tools) and the PDF preview built into those tools makes the lack of WYSIWYG a non issue - for me, at least.
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It’s still there. You won’t see it listed on the standard Adobe products page but you will find it here:
It will do whatever all you technical, academic users are clamoring for: TOC’s, indexes, footnotes, endnotes, formulae, caption-numbering streams, language variations, endless outputs, and on and on and on.
Just a couple problems. They’ve updated it continuously but they don’t seem to understand that 30 years of updates should also include increasing elegance. And . . . the current eye-watering price is $500/year.
Dave
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For major technical reports most of my clients require documents to be supplied in MS Word and some prefer references as footnotes. Word does a reasonable job of this, with automatic numbering and re-numbering of footnotes.
As much as I would prefer to not use MS products I usually end up using them for compatibility purposes with clients and friends.
Here is an example of a report supplied to a client in Word format, with extensive use of footnotes:
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Hence Mellel for me.
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I write for a variety of publishers, and that means I need a variety of things. The hardest to get is something that handles ChangeTracking well, and the only thing that I have found that does is Microsoft Word. Change Tracking is all about accuracy, and you don’t want software that makes errors or software that your publishers won’t use (typically because it doesn’t work with something else they use). That said, Word’s Change Tracking has serious problems in presentation and feels like it’s ready to break.
Other requirements for science and technology writing are handling equations and odd characters in other languages or disciplines. That’s the big appeal of LaTeX and the like, but as far as I know, it does not handle Change Tracking.
One of the worst pains in the ass is publishers who insist on writers using their in-house software.
The bottom line is that some of us may end up with few choices.
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