Footnotes

Overview

A footnote is a small numbered mark in your text and a matching note at the foot of the page. The mark appears in two places — after the passage it annotates, and again in front of the note itself — and TheBrain keeps them together by the label they share.

Footnotes are saved in standard Markdown ([^1] in the text, [^1]: the note at the bottom), which is the same syntax Obsidian, GitHub, Typora and Pandoc use — so a note with footnotes reads correctly in those tools too.

Adding a Footnote

1. Put the cursor where the mark belongs and choose Insert > Insert Footnote from the note's right-click menu, or use the notes toolbar's Insert menu.
2. The mark appears with the next unused number, already selected — type anything you like to replace it. A label does not have to be a number: [^method], [^Klein 1978] or [^why] all work, and a word is often easier to follow than a digit. A label can't be empty or contain ], but spaces are fine once you have typed something. Keep the number by simply not typing. Press Enter or → to leave the mark and carry on with your sentence.
3. Click the mark to write its note. The note is added at the foot of the page, in the right place among the others, with the cursor in it.

Writing the note is deliberately a separate step: you can drop marks through a draft while the sentences are still moving and fill in the notes afterwards.

Position matters: with the cursor at the start of a line (nothing but spaces before it), the menu item reads Insert Footnote Definition and inserting creates the footnote's note itself there, with the rest of the line as its text — rather than a mark in a sentence. Footnotes can't go inside table cells.

Whatever you name a mark, its note carries the same label — that is what keeps the two together, so renaming one half is how you rename the footnote.

Adding footnotes requires the brain to save notes in standard Markdown — see Standard Markdown Notes. In a brain that hasn't switched, Insert Footnote doesn't appear; instead Enable Footnotes and Diagrams… at the bottom of the Insert menu that right-clicking in the note opens explains the requirement and offers to open the brain's Note Format settings. The notes toolbar's Insert menu just leaves Insert Footnote out.

Only inserting is restricted: any brain and any account still shows footnotes a note already has, and editing, arranging, and renumbering existing footnotes work for everyone.

Typing a Footnote as Markdown

Typing [^1] in the rich text editor does not create a footnote. The editor has no typing shortcut for footnotes, so the characters stay plain text, and they are still plain text after the note is saved and reopened. To write a footnote as Markdown, switch the note to the Text view and type it there: [^1] where the mark goes, and [^1]: your note at the start of a line of its own. The rest of that line is the footnote's note. Back in the rich text view, both show as a footnote. Otherwise use Insert > Insert Footnote.

Reading and Moving Between Them

• Hover a mark to read its note without leaving your place. Click it to jump to the note.
• Hover the mark in front of a note to see Go to mark, and click to jump back to the text.
• On a phone or tablet, tap once to see what hovering would show, then tap that to go.

Unfinished Footnotes

A mark with no note yet — or a note whose mark you deleted — is outlined in orange, so you can see at a glance what is still unfinished rather than having to hunt for it. Hovering says which it is: Click to add footnote on a mark that needs a note, Mark is missing on a note that has lost its mark. Adding the missing half clears the outline.

Arranging and Renumbering

Right-click any footnote mark for two commands:

• Arrange Footnotes — Gathers the notes at the foot of the page, under a horizontal rule, in the order their marks appear in the text.
• Renumber Footnotes — Numbers every footnote 1, 2, 3… in that same order. Any label you typed yourself is replaced by a number — [^Klein 1978] becomes [^4] — so this is not the command to reach for in a note with named footnotes. Undo puts them back if you run it by mistake.

Both keep each note and its mark together. A note whose mark is missing has no place in the reading order, so it is left at the end with its label untouched.

Related Topics

• Standard Markdown Notes
• Writing and Formatting Notes
• Markdown in Notes