Add footnote support to smolnet

itsybitsy's Markdown parser has no footnote extension enabled, so a
[^key] reference and its [^key]: definition were passing through as
literal bracket text in every capsule. SMOLNET_FOOTNOTES, off by
default, rewrites references into numbered [N] markers in order of
first appearance and relocates definitions to a trailing "## Notes"
section.

Verified against sublunar.space's real content (the first site to turn
this on), which surfaced three cases synthetic test data would not
have:

- A definition whose citation link lazy-wraps onto an unindented
  second physical line (ordinary CommonMark paragraph continuation)
  was truncated at the first newline, leaving the wrapped half as
  orphaned, bracket-broken text in the body. FOOTNOTE_DEF now consumes
  lazy-continuation lines up to the next blank line or next
  definition, and joins them back into one line.
- A reference immediately followed by an ordinary colon in the
  author's own prose ("Gnosis[^gnosis]: collective critique...") was
  being skipped by a now-redundant negative lookahead that existed to
  avoid confusing a reference with a definition's own opening bracket
  -- a confusion FOOTNOTE_DEF already resolves upstream by stripping
  every genuine definition line before FOOTNOTE_REF ever runs.
- An assigned footnote number could collide with a pre-existing bare-
  integer reference-link id already used elsewhere in the same
  article (sixnames.md cites sources that way); CommonMark would
  silently resolve the collision into an unrelated hyperlink. Numbers
  are now assigned skipping any integer a "[N]: url" definition
  already owns in the same document.

randogoth.com has no footnotes in its content (grep confirmed), so it
is unaffected either way; zonetoast.com's content could not be checked
from here, which is why this stays opt-in rather than on by default.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
randogoth 2026-10-10 15:24:39 +03:00
parent 9817e7190c
commit bfb54d3ffa

View file

@ -27,6 +27,10 @@ setting, and every setting has a default, so a site can switch it on with just
SMOLNET_TAGLINE None one line at the foot of the index
SMOLNET_COMMENTS None thread URL per article, `{slug}` substituted
SMOLNET_COMMENTS_FORMATS formats that get it, default gemtext and text
SMOLNET_FOOTNOTES False rewrite [^key] footnotes into a numbered
Notes section; off by default since not
every site using this plugin has been
checked for footnotes
Why link-only paragraphs rather than lists: gemtext has one kind of link, a line
beginning `=>`, so a renderer has to lift links out of the prose. itsybitsy's
@ -61,6 +65,7 @@ LABELS = {
"pages": "Pages",
"back": "Back to the index",
"comments": "Comments",
"notes": "Notes",
}
# Pelican's metadata block: bare `Key: value` lines from the first line on,
@ -87,6 +92,39 @@ SUMMARY_MARKER = "<!-- PELICAN_END_SUMMARY -->"
# sees the capsule.
MD_IMAGE = re.compile(r'!\[[^\]]*\]\(\s*(https?://[^\s)]+)[^)]*\)')
# A footnote definition, Markdown-Extra style: "[^key]: text". The text runs
# to the next blank line or the next definition, not to the next newline: a
# definition's own citation link is often hand-wrapped onto an unindented
# second physical line, which CommonMark treats as a lazy continuation of the
# same paragraph (rendered with no line break at all). An earlier version of
# this regex stopped at the first `$` and left that second line behind as an
# orphaned, bracket-broken paragraph in the body -- caught by building a real
# site and reading the output, not by the narrower check (indented
# continuations only) done beforehand.
FOOTNOTE_DEF = re.compile(
r"^\[\^([^\]]+)\]:[ \t]*(.*(?:\n(?![ \t]*\n|\[\^)[^\n]*)*)",
re.MULTILINE,
)
# An inline reference, "[^key]". No exclusion for a trailing ":" here: by the
# time this runs, FOOTNOTE_DEF.sub has already stripped every genuine
# definition line out of the text, so a "[^key]" that is still present can
# only be an inline reference -- including the fairly common case of one
# followed by an ordinary colon in the author's own prose ("Gnosis[^gnosis]:
# collective critique and experimentation..."), which an earlier version of
# this regex wrongly left unrewritten by trying to guard against a confusion
# that FOOTNOTE_DEF already resolves upstream.
FOOTNOTE_REF = re.compile(r"\[\^([^\]]+)\]")
# A CommonMark reference-link definition using a bare integer as its id, e.g.
# "[18]: https://...". At least one article here (sixnames.md) cites sources
# this way. A renderer resolves a later bare "[18]" in running text as a
# shortcut reference link to that target -- so a footnote number assigned
# without checking this would, if it ever landed on the same integer, turn an
# inserted footnote marker into a silent, wrong hyperlink instead of the
# citation it was meant to carry.
LINKREF_DEF = re.compile(r"^\[(\d+)\]:", re.MULTILINE)
def rot13(text):
"""The obfuscation used on addresses in the HTML templates."""
@ -220,6 +258,65 @@ def drop_dead_images(text, dead):
return re.sub(r"\n[ \t]*\n[ \t]*\n+", "\n\n", text)
def rewrite_footnotes(text, labels, warn):
"""Turn Markdown-Extra footnotes into something a footnote-less renderer
can show: inline refs become "[1]", "[2]", ... in order of first
appearance, and the definitions move to a "## Notes" section at the end.
itsybitsy's Markdown parser has no footnote extension enabled, so left
alone, both the inline "[^key]" and the "[^key]: text" definition line
print as literal bracket text in the capsule. Off by default (see
SMOLNET_FOOTNOTES) since not every site using this plugin has had its
content checked for footnotes.
"""
defs = {}
def strip_def(match):
# Collapse any lazy-continuation line breaks back into the single
# flowing line Markdown would have rendered them as, the way a line
# break folds to nothing right after an opening "[": the citation
# link itself can start on the wrapped line with nothing between the
# bracket and the break.
joined = re.sub(r"\s*\n\s*", " ", match.group(2)).strip()
joined = re.sub(r"\[\s+", "[", joined)
defs[match.group(1)] = joined
return ""
body = FOOTNOTE_DEF.sub(strip_def, text)
# The def lines are gone; squeeze the blank run they leave, same as
# drop_dead_images does for a dropped image's own empty line.
body = re.sub(r"\n[ \t]*\n[ \t]*\n+", "\n\n", body)
# Numbers assigned skip any integer a reference-link definition already
# owns elsewhere in this same document, so an inserted marker can never
# collide with one.
reserved = {int(n) for n in LINKREF_DEF.findall(body)}
numbers = {}
next_number = [1]
def number_ref(match):
key = match.group(1)
if key not in defs:
warn("smolnet: footnote ref [^%s] has no definition", key)
return match.group(0)
if key not in numbers:
while next_number[0] in reserved:
next_number[0] += 1
numbers[key] = next_number[0]
next_number[0] += 1
return "[%d]" % numbers[key]
body = FOOTNOTE_REF.sub(number_ref, body)
if not numbers:
return body
notes = ["## %s" % labels["notes"], ""]
for key, n in sorted(numbers.items(), key=lambda kv: kv[1]):
notes.append("%d. %s" % (n, defs[key]))
return body.rstrip() + "\n\n" + "\n".join(notes) + "\n"
def toml_escape(value):
return str(value).replace("\\", "\\\\").replace('"', '\\"')
@ -276,6 +373,7 @@ class CapsuleGenerator(Generator):
dead_hosts = {h.lower().lstrip(".") for h in
s.get("LOSTIMAGES_DEAD_HOSTS", [])}
sidecar_name = s.get("SMOLNET_SIDECAR", ".itsybitsy.toml")
footnotes = s.get("SMOLNET_FOOTNOTES", False)
# kapara serves the same remark42 thread the HTML widget shows, over
# Gemini, Spartan and Nex. Articles only: the widget is on articles
# only, and a page with a thread nobody can reach from the site is a
@ -308,6 +406,8 @@ class CapsuleGenerator(Generator):
body = rewrite_html_links(body, slugs, self._warn)
body = reveal_rot13(body, rot_attr)
body = drop_dead_images(body, dead_hosts)
if footnotes:
body = rewrite_footnotes(body, labels, self._warn)
# Blank lines, not newlines: a heading and the line under it are
# separate blocks only if a blank line divides them, otherwise the
# date runs into the first sentence as one paragraph.