footnotes in user tools

[Mike Atnip]

So I have been spending some time making some user tools. The importer plays funny games sometimes, but I can get it to work enough to get a text into Accordance to be read and searched. For an example of "funny games," here is a screenshot of a text that makes a heading out of paragraph tagged <p>, dropping the first letter of the paragraph. It did this a total of nine random times (out of a full length book of 400 pages). 🙂

 

But the footnotes are what I want to nail down. The location option works well (if you don't edit the text after making the links), but it is a lot easier to use the search option for a text. But that doesn't work so well. However, I found a little tweak I can make that "fixes" the hit and miss footnoting (some notes act like they should, the majority don't. You might get two hits, one or both ending up on a random piece of text somewhere. Or it may not even search.) But if I edit the link in Accordance once it is imported, selecting "Scripture/text" instead of the default "URL" that it uses, the footnotes will go to the exact spot, even though it opens a new instance of the module.

So my question is for anyone who has tinkered with footnotes, am I using the right options with this: <a href="accord://search/The_Pilgrim_Church;content?fn-1">[1]</a>

The footnote is at "fn-1". As I mentioned, when the Scripture/text option is selected after importing, it nails it perfectly. But otherwise it is more miss than hit.

This book (The Pilgrim Church by E.H. Broadbent) has 123 footnotes, and it would be a time-saver for me to do this in Notepad++ before importing, rather than manually making or correcting each link after importing.

Thanks for any help.

Mike

PS I am pretty sure this work is in public domain as the author died over 95 years ago. If Accordance would like to add it, I can send the html file or the accordance file to someone who can fix it like a good module should be. Of the making of modules, there is a LOT OF WORK! 🙂

[Mike Atnip]

The above was a midnight brain spill. To summarize what I was thinking, if switching the link to "Scripture/text" after importing makes the links work correctly, what (if anything) could be done in the anchor tag to make that happen automatically? Now that I think about it, it is probably an internal/external link distinction. (?) For my purposes, it would be better to have that defaulted to "Scripture/text" for all links, but others may want to make external links. Ideally something could be done to recognize the difference while importing so that both could be used. Or even give the option to choose which one. But I am just making another brain spill here. 🙂

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I think someone was chatting about this in another thread as well if you want to take a look.

[Daniel L]

I've just resorted to putting the footnotes inline with the text but within brackets. Since some footnotes can be very long, I always make them in a different color so I can easily skip over them if I want. I put the footnote numbers in italics or yet another color.

[Mike Atnip]

8 hours ago, Daniel L said:

I've just resorted to putting the footnotes inline with the text but within brackets. Since some footnotes can be very long, I always make them in a different color so I can easily skip over them if I want. I put the footnote numbers in italics or yet another color.

That is what I ended up doing, except I superscripted them. I was smack in the middle of doing this when thunderstorm knocked out power last evening. So I lost all my footnotes since I had moved them over to another file that had not been saved. So when the power came back on I went through the original file and moved them into the html one by one at their location. I now have a link-free file.

The funny thing now is that searching for a word (which is what I wanted my user files for in large part) takes me to a random word near the search term more than half the time. 😕

[Mike Atnip]

15 hours ago, Nathan Parker said:

I think someone was chatting about this in another thread as well if you want to take a look.

I realize I had posted on a similar vein just previously. I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, there was a tweak that could default the link to "Scripture/text" rather than "Web url."

Anyways, as per previous comment I have chosen another method of dealing with footnotes.

Thanks

[jlm]

On 7/19/2023 at 11:56 PM, Mike Atnip said:

So I have been spending some time making some user tools. The importer plays funny games sometimes, but I can get it to work enough to get a text into Accordance to be read and searched. For an example of "funny games," here is a screenshot of a text that makes a heading out of paragraph tagged <p>, dropping the first letter of the paragraph. It did this a total of nine random times (out of a full length book of 400 pages). 🙂

 

But the footnotes are what I want to nail down. The location option works well (if you don't edit the text after making the links), but it is a lot easier to use the search option for a text. But that doesn't work so well. However, I found a little tweak I can make that "fixes" the hit and miss footnoting (some notes act like they should, the majority don't. You might get two hits, one or both ending up on a random piece of text somewhere. Or it may not even search.)

I've run into both of these "peculiarities" of Accordance User Tools. Regarding the first, I think there's some internal limit on how much text you can have between two headings. When this limit is exceeded, the importer turns part of an ordinary paragraph into a heading, and obviously does so badly, because it loses the first character of the paragraph. However, I may be wrong about the cause, because when I added additional headings to a file I was importing in order to try to keep this from happening, it didn't help.

 

The second issue is a bug in User Tool search in general. Often the actual hit is highlighted as it should be. Sometimes something else is highlighted, and it can even be in the wrong paragraph. Apparently the User Tool search code has to be different from the regular Tool search code because User Tools are editable. Somehow this editability makes it more complicated to get search hit highlighting right. I have better luck searching for things that occur at the beginning of paragraphs, like the number of an item in a collection of quotations. For a while, I've wanted to try to reproduce this bug in a User Tool that I can share, but I haven't done so.

 

As for getting links to import as Scripture/Text links, I have no idea how to do that. I'm surprised this even works, because a URL does not have the right format to be a Scripture/Text link. I think you've stumbled upon an unintentional feature, which being unintentional, could potentially stop working in some future version.

 

What I do with footnotes is to place them after the paragraph in which they occur. I produce my User Tools with pandoc, and have a Lua script to deal with footnotes. Where the footnote occurs, it places a superscript number in the text, numbering them in the paragraph starting from one. After the paragraph, it inserts paragraphs for the footnotes, starting each paragraph with the corresponding number. If I could, I would make the text of the footnote paragraphs smaller, but the documented markup for this doesn't work, and my request for the documentation to be fixed has not yet led to a fix.

 

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll re-report the documentation issue.

[Mike Atnip]

Thanks @jlm.  Now that you mention it, it does seem that I remember reading something before about the quirky limit you can have between headings.

I hope the search highlighting can be fixed. Searching is a big reason why I want to add my own modules since I have oodles of things I would like to be searchable in one place (i.e. Accordance!).

I put the footnotes in superscripted text in the place where the footnote number is located in the text. That works, even if unorthodox. Pulling the footnotes out and placing them in another document side by side makes it easy to copy and paste them over. I can place up to maybe 8-10/minute that way, so it doesn't take a lot of time. But I await the day when internal links are accepted in Accordance user modules.

[Gordon Lyons]

On 7/21/2023 at 11:38 AM, Mike Atnip said:

I was smack in the middle of doing this when thunderstorm knocked out power last evening. So I lost all my footnotes since I had moved them over to another file that had not been saved.

@Mike Atnip Are you not using a UPS to protect you from power outages? I've had a few power cuts over the years, but a UPS has kept my computer system going, so I've never lost work for this reason. 

[Mike Atnip]

59 minutes ago, Gordon Lyons said:

@Mike Atnip Are you not using a UPS to protect you from power outages? I've had a few power cuts over the years, but a UPS has kept my computer system going, so I've never lost work for this reason. 

No, I am not, although with several power outages in the last couple of weeks I was thinking about getting one. For many years I used a laptop, so a power outage didn't cause any loss. NOw I am on an all-in-one system (the reason for this is that it has a superb touchscreen for artwork). I do not know why there have been a string of outages this year here; it seems rather abnormal for our area.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I definitely recommend a UPS (Provantage sold me basic one for under $100). After all of the power glitches around here knocking my iMac Pro and routers offline and waiting for them to reboot, I broke down and bought a UPS. Best investment I made in years.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

The documentation issue will likely be resolved in the next update. I reported it to the wrong department the first time.