[Orgmode] Re: Footnotes and org-export, revisited

[Scot Becker]

I'm torn.

Usage 1 is harder to read.  My footnotes, for example, are very long
compared to your example.  Of course, within emacs, this could be made
much less severe with a little syntax coloring.  It has the advantage
that it never gets lost or otherwise mangled without your knowledge,
and you don't have to wonder whether you used 'kenpo' as a reference
already, and just what might be the consequences if you did.  It's
only liability is readability.

Usage 2 is easier to read, which is the trend in plain-text markup
these days.  Pandoc, Multi-Markdown and ReST all do it this way, which
isn't to say that we should.  It is a little more fragile, since I
might move the paragraph and forget its accompanying footnote, and it
leaves the user to come up with an original reference name, which
could get to be burdensome in if you try to write in an academic field
which averages 3-5  footnotes per page (1 per 75 words or so).  It's
also more typing work.

Some of the disadvantages of Usage 2 can helped. A fairly simple
footnote composition routine could automate the note entry and return
to the body text, and, for the desperate, could append a few random
characters to the reference for uniqueness.
 Its similarity to the other minimal markup languages might lend
itself towards easy export to those.  (Pandoc, for example, has
initial support for citeproc a citatation scheme still in development
which aims at being a kind of BibTeX for plain-text markup languages).

A user's preference probably depends on whether they expect to do a
lot of editing within org (where you might bias readability and
therefore the separation of note and body text) or just want a quick
write, either because you don't require a lot of reworking or because
you plan to do it elsewhere,  in LaTeX, one of the lightweight
markups, or a (gasp) GUI Word Processor.

Scot