quarto-dev / quarto-dev/quarto-cli

Presentations + Footnotes

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enhancement revealjs
Dominant language
JavaScript
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

In my opinion it doesn't make sense to present footnotes at the bottom of a slide in a presentation. Not only do they often cause issues with the layout because there is simply not enough space for them on the slide. It also doesn't make sense to show footnotes which cannot be read by the viewer anyway, because the fontsize is so small. Also in presentations I use footnotes mostly just as replacement for citations, because for a presentation I do not want to deal with a second file just for a very small bibliography.

That said, I was happy to see that - although it is not documented at https://quarto.org/docs/presentations/revealjs/#asides-footnotes - it is possible to move footnotes to the end of a quarto presentation with

---
title: "Some presentation"
format: 
    revealjs:
        reference-location: document
    beamer:
        reference-location: document         
section-title-footnotes: References        
---

However there are several issues with that:

  1. It doesn't work for beamer
  2. In revealjs clicking on a footnote number navigates you to the title page, but not to the footnote at the end of the document (But the hover shows the content of the footnote nicely). The footnote link is somehow messed up.
  3. The footnotes at the end of the document are missing a backlink to the footnote.
  4. It seems to me that although the footnote is not shown on the slide, adding a footnote to a slide can still break the layout. For example in the following presentation the image on the middle slide will appear much smaller than on the start side. The reason is the footnote:
---
title: "Some presentation"
format: 
    revealjs:
        reference-location: document
section-title-footnotes: References        
---

## start 

![](some_image.png)

- text without footnote

## middle

![](some_image.png)

- text with footnote^[important footnote]

## end

Changing the layout if a footnote is present makes sense, if the footnotes are on the same slide, but it shouldn't be done if the footnotes are collected at the end of the document.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the provided revealjs and beamer presentations with reference-location: document, including the linked asides-footnotes documentation. Check the four reported behaviors: beamer support, navigation to collected footnotes, backlinks, and layout changes; done means collected footnotes render and navigate correctly without shrinking slide content.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
documentation, frontend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

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