Gabe Weatherhead (a.k.a. MacDrifter) made a special request yesterday that — after some discussion — made sense in the spirit of readable Markdown. He wanted to be able to use the inline footnote converter in the Markdown Service Tools, but needed to be able to name his footnote markers instead of just assigning them sequential numbers.

The revised version of the Service is backward-compatible, so if you’re using it you don’t have to do anything differently. You now have the extra option of including a marker name in brackets at the very beginning of an inline footnote.

(*[marker] and then your footnote*)

(*[btw] The service has been updated to better handle

multi-paragraph

footnotes*)

You can also include multiple references to a footnote that hasn’t been created yet. If you make a note like (*[this] and put your text in it*), you can include [^this] anywhere and it will link up when you run the Service.

I also threw an extra Service in that I find constantly handy despite it basically being a one-liner: Compress Empty Lines. It quickly strips out multiple newlines and leaves paragraphs and code intact. Just neatens things up. It’s under Paragraphs in the tools.

Now go write something, and remember, footnotes make you look sexier.

Markdown Service Tools v3.0.3

The Markdown Service Tools are a collection of macOS Services designed to make creating Markdown-formatted text that much easier. Services work in almos any macOS application.

Published 01/09/14.

Updated 09/14/20. Changelog

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