How to add footnotes to GitHub-flavoured Markdown?

Solution 1:

Expanding a little bit on the previous answer, you can make the footnote links clickable here as well. First define the footnote at the bottom like this

<a name="myfootnote1">1</a>: Footnote content goes here

Then reference it at some other place in the document like this

<sup>[1](#myfootnote1)</sup>

Solution 2:

GitHub Flavored Markdown doesn't support footnotes, but you can manually fake it¹ with Unicode characters or superscript tags, e.g. <sup>1</sup>.

¹Of course this isn't ideal, as you are now responsible for maintaining the numbering of your footnotes. It works reasonably well if you only have one or two, though.

Solution 3:

Expanding on the previous answers even further, you can add an id attribute to your footnote's link:

 Bla bla <sup id="a1">[1](#f1)</sup>

Then from within the footnote, link back to it.

<b id="f1">1</b> Footnote content here. [↩](#a1)

This will add a little ↩ at the end of your footnote's content, which takes your readers back to the line containing the footnote's link.

Solution 4:

I wasn't able to get Surya's and Matteo's solutions to work. For example, "(#f1)" was just displayed as text, and didn't become a link. However, their solutions led me to slightly different solution. (I also formatted the footnote and the link back to the original superscript a bit differently.)

In the body of the text:

Yadda yadda<a href="#note1" id="note1ref"><sup>1</sup></a>

At the end of the document:

<a id="note1" href="#note1ref"><sup>1</sup></a>Here is the footnote text.

Clicking on the superscript in the footnote returns to the superscript in the original text.

Solution 5:

Although I am not aware if it's officially documented anywhere, you can do footer notes in Github.

1. Mark the place where you want to insert footer link with a number enclosed in square brackets, I.E. [1]

2. On the bottom of the post, make a reference of the numbered marker and followed by a colon and the link, I.E. [1]: http://www.example.com/link1

And once you preview it, it will be rendered as numbered links in the body of the post.