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Hi friend. If I may? If you want to do footnotes on HN you can use the dagger symbol, like so†. Dagger is Unicode U+2020 which you can read about here[1]. Aste
by igravious 9y ago
Hi friend.
If I may? If you want to do footnotes on HN you can use the dagger symbol, like so†. Dagger is Unicode U+2020 which you can read about here[1]. Asterisk is out of bounds because it is typographically significant in Markdown and dagger is the next in the order[2].
It's just that conventionally numbers enclosed by [] are used for non-inline hyperlinks (denoting cited references) in order to not clutter up the text with incomprehensible and long URLs. I think this is from text email culture but it could go back even further, I am not sure about that.
Apologies for the persnicketiness.
[1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2020/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2020/index.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_(typography)#Numbering_and_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_(typography)#Numbering_an...
† I am a footnote indexed by a dagger. On Linux at least you can enter Unicode by using the key combo Ctlr-Shift-u and keying in the appropriate number. Dagger is easy to remember because it is 2020.
- Y_Y 9y agoI like daggers as much as the next guy (do you know the code for double dagger when you need a second one). However plenty of publications mix footnote citations and footnote comments in the same style without any confusion or aesthetic issues. Is there a good reason (other than coolness) to use dagger?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- igravious 9y agoI was operating under the impression that a single asterisk would muck up the Markdown parsing on HN. Turns out I'm half wrong it seems. Some work. With the italicised tests below, the first has a prepended asterisk, the second has an appended one. * Test Test* Test Test Test * I think I just started using daggers because U+2020 was super easy to remember and to avoid Markdown issues and the habit has stuck. You don't by any chance use Vim, do you? I use the Unicode plugin[0] by Christian Brabandt in Vim to quickly search for Unicode characters. You can use vim-plug[1][2] by Junegunn Choi, for instance, to install it and keep it updated or just install it manually yourself. call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged') Plug 'https://github.com/chrisbra/unicode.vim' call plug#end() Then within vim type :UnicodeSearch dagger to search for daggers. This gives me: † U+2020 Dec:008224 DAGGER (/-) † ‡ U+2021 Dec:008225 DOUBLE DAGGER (/=) ‡ ‡ ⸶ U+2E36 Dec:011830 DAGGER WITH LEFT GUARD ⸶ ⸷ U+2E37 Dec:011831 DAGGER WITH RIGHT GUARD ⸷ ⸸ U+2E38 Dec:011832 TURNED DAGGER ⸸ U+1F5E1 Dec:128481 DAGGER KNIFE 🗡 [0] https://github.com/chrisbra/unicode.vim https://github.com/chrisbra/unicode.vim [1] https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug [2] https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug/wiki/tips#automatic-installation https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug/wiki/tips#automatic-ins...