Footnotes rarely need to be larger than 8 or 9 point. If carefully designed, they need not enlarge either the page or the cost of printing it. Sidenotes give more life and variety to the page and are the easiest of all to find and read. They do, however, require the serious reader to use two bookmarks and to read with both hands as well as both eyes, swapping back and forth between the popular and the persnickety parts of the text. They also leave the text page clean except for a peppering of superscripts.
Footnotes that extend to a second page (as some long footnotes are bound to do) are an abject failure of design.Įndnotes can be just as economical of space, less trouble to design and less expensive to set, and they can comfortably run to any length.
Long footnotes are inevitably a distraction: tedious to read and wearying to look at. If they are short and infrequent, they can be made economical of space, easy to find when wanted and, when not wanted, easy to ignore. But none of these are served well online by endnotes: citation metadata is better provided as hyperlinks to fulltext, definitions ( )/ abbreviations ( ) have native HTML support as tooltips/popups-leaving only the extended discussions use-case.īringhurst comments on the pros/cons ( The Elements of Typographic Style, 2004):įootnotes are the very emblem of fussiness, but they have their uses. Why do we use endnotes? For the most part, we use them for citation metadata, abbreviations/definitions, and more extended discussions (often humorous). The situation is even worse on the Internet, because while footnotes in a book aren’t too bad (as long as they stay on the same page), web pages don’t really have ‘pages’ and ‘footnotes’ wind up degrading to simply endnotes. As a result, who ever reads endnotes in a physical book? Only the most diligent will keep a thumb in the back to actually look up endnotes, and so they are either unread or tend to be relegated to the most utilitarian uses like raw citations. This river of text may be studded with the occasional footnote or endnote, including ancillary material like citations or digressions or extended discussion of tricky points or anticipation of objections or just the author being witty, which require constant back and forth from the place in the text where they make sense and where they can actually be read. Where footnotes put additional material in small sections at the bottom of the page, organized by number, and endnotes stuff them at the end of the document, sidenotes instead use the large unused left/right margin of the page.īecause it’s uncomfortable to read sentences which wrap from edge to edge, particularly for large widths, requiring short lines many documents wind up looking like a narrow river of text flowing down a vast blank map. Sidenotes and margin notes (sometimes also called “asides”) are an alternative to footnotes / endnotes in design. For heavy footnote users or users who want a drop-in, runtime Javascript-based solutions like sidenotes.js may be more useful.
I review some of the available implementations.įor general users, I recommend Tufte-CSS: it is fast & simple (using only compile-time generation of sidenotes, rendered by static HTML/CSS), popular, and easy to integrate into most website workflows. Tufte-CSS has popularized the idea and since then, there has been a proliferation of slightly variant approaches. However, they are not commonly used, perhaps because web browsers until relatively recently made it hard to implement sidenotes easily & reliably. (Footnote variants, like “floating footnotes” which pop up on mouse hover, reduce the reader’s effort but don’t eliminate it.) They are particularly useful for web pages, where ‘footnotes’ are de facto endnotes, and clicking back and forth to endnotes is a pain for readers. Sidenotes/margin notes are a typographic convention which improves on footnotes & endnotes by instead putting the notes in the page margin to let the reader instantly read them without needing to refer back and forth to the end of the document (endnotes) or successive pages (footnotes spilling over).
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