Footnotes in Jupyter Notebooks?

[stur86]

I'm trying to write something that has code that needs to be executed, but also want to include footnotes. The problem I'm having is that the standard Jupyter Notebooks don't support MyST syntax for footnotes. On the other hand, though, using the mixed markdown notebook format works, but does not allow me to execute the code interactively when writing it to check that it's correct. Is there a good practice here or something I'm missing? Are there tools to view the MyST-style markdown notebooks interactively? I'm using VSCode but couldn't find any dedicated plugin. Thanks!

[agoose77]

Hi @stur86!

The lack of footenote support is a VSCode frontend problem — Most Jupyter frontends like JupyterLab use CommonMark, which supports footnotes. There is a legacy MyST plugin for VSCode for the old Python stack, but if it still works it would likely not be entirely compatible with the new MyST features.

I tend to use JLab as my frontend when working on .ipynb files, although increasingly I author .md notebooks with MyST and use the interactive editor + browser experience. Whether you're authoring .md or .ipynb files, you can use myst start (or jupyter book start for the JB2 alpha), and load the webpage in VSCode.