Hey Herb. For some reason I thought that this was already possible, but apparently I was thinking of Marked 2, which is able to randomize footnote ids to avoid conflicts between footnotes (and presumably citations) when multiple document containing either are displayed on a single web page.
For instance, I’ve generated an HTML document that displays multiple individual notes on a single page. Some of these notes contain footnotes.
What would have to be randomized are the identifying labels (i.e. what follows the colon in a footnote/citation id and its corresponding reference id) attributed to each footnote/citation.
If Document A has a sentence with has a footnote, for example:
<p>
This is a sentence with a footnote. <a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" title="see footnote" class="footnote">[1]</a>
</p>
And the footnote itself:
<li id="fn:1">
<p>The footnote <a href="#fnref:1" title="return to article" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p>
</li>
And Document B has a footnote of its own, then they will both “share” the fn:1
and fnref:1
IDs, hence conflicting. The footnotes written for Document B will instead link to Document A.
To avoid this, it may help if users were able to append a new merge variable modifier to the body field that can randomize these fn
, fnref
, cn
and cnref
IDs into unique alphanumerical strings. For example:
<li id="fn:1avc2">
<p>The footnote <a href="#fnref:1avc2" title="return to article" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p>
</li>
This can prove useful when generating web pages like blogs that display all of its posts in their entirety on the front page.
I hope that what I’ve described is coherent. Thanks again for all of your work.