Hello, need footnotes for Dynalist to become my all-in-all notetaking app.
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Hi Ray, thanks for the suggestion. Do you mind explaining in a bit more details? Dynalist doesn’t have the concept of pages, and it’s not a traditional word processor application either, so I wonder where footnotes come in, and how they can help.
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I want to use Dynalist for making acacemic notes for writing later. There are programs that automatically insert footnotes reference (Bookends for example) to make that process easier
If I don’t have the foot notes, I won’t know exactly where I got the information from when I go to write. The only thing I can do now is to make a note in parenthesis. Which, is okay, just not very streamlined.
I will still use Dynalist if you don’t have this feature. And I understand if this is not in line with your purpose.
Thanks for asking.
Ray
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Hi Ray, thanks for being so understanding. Unfortunately it’s not what we envision for Dynalist, at least not for now.
Okay, thanks Erica. I’m just putting the page and the source in parenthesis and adding footnotes when I export.
–Ray
Hi there!
I wanto to use Dynalist as the place where I write drafts of my academic texts, which should be edited later in an appropriate program. But already when writing in Dynalist, I’d like to be able to enter footnotes in some way.
Imagine that I am writing a paragraph and in the middle of it I want to put a note. How could I do it, considering that I will export the draft to an editor like Microsoft Word? Is there any workaround to do this? I mean, it wouldn’t be necessary to have footnotes in Dynalist, but I would like to have a way to translate something that would serve this purpose as footnotes in text editors.
Thank’s and any suggestion would be much appreciated!
Thiago
Just for illustrate:
I have a macro in Microsoft Word that transforms text in green color into footnote. It is useful to me because I use a wiki-like software called ConnectedText. There the footnotes are like this: [! This is a footnote!]. If I export the text this way, what was footnote in ConnectedText is not kept as a footnote in Word. The output I found was as follows. Before exporting the text, I change the color of the contents of footnotes to green ([! This is a footnote!] Becomes %% greenThis is a footnote %%). I export to HTML, open the file in Word and run the macro.
Hope it did not get too confused!
Thank’s!
Thiago
Couldn’t you just use the notes feature that already exists as a place for sources?
Please don’t get me wrong, I love Dynalist and your work but I not understand is the argument, that some features do not do fit the vision of Dynalist.
In my opinion Dynalist is great, because everyone can use it in their own way. Dynalist is a sandbox. I see people applying GTD to it, I see people do bullet journaling and so on.
That’s why in my opinion every feature which enhances the toolbox of Dynalist should be considered as valuable. But I know too, that you have limited development resources. But I hope someday Dynalist is doing financially well enough to employ more devs. It is a great tool and I rely heavily on it. Keep up the good work 
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Well said!
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Not just development resources, although that is a limitation.
When a tool gets better at A, it generally gets worse at B. Otherwise companies with almost infinite development resources like Google could have already built the perfect solution for everything, right? Calendar, todo list, notes, spreadsheets, all in one place and easy to use. In my humble opinion though, as Dynalist gets better at outlining, it will be less good as a document tool like Microsoft Word.
Our vision to solve this problem is to provide an interface to “mod” Dynalist and let people create plugins. This way, people who want footnotes can install a footnote plugin. Everyone else won’t get affected at all. In fact, they won’t know there exists this plugin until they search for it.
Basically, we’re not opposed to adding something to Dynalist to your own experience. That’s different from adding the same thing to Dynalist to everyone’s experience. What we don’t want is adding a feature that 1% of users want, and the other 99% get confused when they see it. Most of our users do not write academic papers in Dynalist, as far as I know (no data, just a gut feeling from talking to users). So I’m afraid going too far in this direction will confuse people who come here for our promise for “the best outlining app”.
I guess that’s part of the reason why Microsft Word has macros. Even the pretty bloated Word can’t please everyone and they have to give people tools to do it themselves.
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Thanks for you reply . I think Plugins would be the perefect solution for that. Looking forward to it!
It will be a big project for sure! But it’s also what makes apps like Sublime Text and Visual Studio code so functional & flexible. We look forward to it too!
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