4 ms·

What does the [xfs] placeholder stand for?

• iamwil 15y ago
  Same thing that xkcd stands for: nothing. It's just a series of letters that is unlikely to exist in any normal word, so he can search for it easily later, and replace it with a number. Since you never know what order the footnotes end up being, he starts off with a key in a hash, rather than index in an array.
  • rcfox 15y ago
    You'd think that this would be automated in modern editors... The only thing I've seen that bothers to do it is LaTeX.
    • pbiggar 15y ago
      Restructured text does this too.
  • angli 15y ago
    I'm actually interested in how this is done. Is there a systematic method for it, or does one pick an arbitrary string? I've always used (and been forced to renumber) ordinals, so this seems quite useful.