More on Tufte-Style Sidenotes

There have been some important tweaks to TfTHacker’s implementation.

I’ve write several posts on the new Tufte-style sidenotes by TfTHacker, like Obsidian Tufte-style Sidenotes, and Obsidian Properties Meets Sidenotes. TfTHacker wrote about them: Tufte Style Sidenotes in Obsidian.

This is not intended as a basic overview; those earlier posts do that. I am just going to point out the benefits of some tweaks recently implemented.

Note: there is still a basic barrier to use with sidenotes. The system does not render natively in Obsidian’s edit mode, as do a great deal of other markdown and Obsidian primitives, unlike text styling, transclusion, and tables, to name just a few that do.

Since sidenotes are built on top of footnotes, it inherits (at least at the present time) the same issue with rendering of footnotes: they are only produced in their desired form in reading mode, or PDF exports.

As a result, when I am working with heavily sidenoted files, I go through a somewhat laborious process. I open the file I want to mess with, I split right (making two panels for the same file), I open one of the two panels through ‘move to new window’, and then position that window to the side, so I can view both, side-by-side. I toggle the first panel (the left one) to read mode, and link the left tab with the right one so that they will scroll together. Then I have something like this: