cmatmsu / sort-markdown-footnotes

Sorting Markdown footnote markers into their order of appearance in the text.

Sort Markdown Footnotes

This is a Python script to sort Markdown footnote markers like [^fn1] into their order of appearance in the text.

It reads a Markdown file via standard input and tidies the containing Multimarkdown footnotes. The footnote texts will also be numbered in the order they appear in the text and placed at the bottom of the file.

The needed Markdown footnotes syntax can be easily created by using Vim and my fork of the vim-markdownfootnotes plugin.

Function

Basically, it looks a lot like this:

Markdown does not care a bit about the order in which the footnotes appear in the text. Both texts above render to the exact same HTML. But it is just much nicer looking, isn't it?

Commandline usage

Just place the script somewhere in your path , ~/bin comes to mind, and use it in a standard Unix pipe way:

cat ugly-text.markdown | sort_footnotes > beautiful-text.markdown

Usage with Vim

I defined the following mapping in my .vimrc:

" Sort footnotes into order of appearance
nnoremap <leader>fs mm :%! ~/bin/sort_footnotes<CR> `m :delmarks m<CR>

And now just call <Leader>fs whenever I feel my footnotes should get sorted.

Credits

The whole script is based on the post Tidying Markdown reference links by Dr. Drang.

Sample text produced by the awesome Samuel L. Ipsum.

Caveats

Do not place footnote reference links at the start of a line, bad things will happen, your footnotes will be eaten by a grue.