reusable-footnotes extension: page-local reusable footnotes for Quarto

[lsbjordao]

Description

I built reusable-footnotes, a Quarto extension designed especially for Law and the Humanities, where a reference often needs to remain physically close to the passage, argument, or proposition it supports.

The primary focus is on printable outputs — especially PDF and DOCX. In legal and humanities writing, full bibliographic references are frequently placed in page footnotes so that readers can identify the authority without having to leave the page or consult a distant bibliography.

The extension allows identical footnotes to be reused within the same page, avoiding repeated long references, while allowing the same source to appear again as a full footnote on later pages.

It supports:

• PDF/LaTeX with true page-aware footnote reuse;
• DOCX with deterministic page-local scopes;
• page-local or continuous footnote numbering;
• Quarto websites and books, with local or global numbering across HTML pages;
• integration with bibentry, allowing full CSL bibliography entries inside native footnotes;
• BibTeX as the single source of bibliographic data;
• no Python post-processing.

For example:

A legal proposition.^[See [@silva2026]{.bibentry}]

The same source again on the same page.^[See [@silva2026]{.bibentry}]

On the same page, both calls can share one canonical footnote. If the source is cited again on a later page, its full reference can appear again there — keeping the authority close to the text that relies on it.

The repository includes examples for PDF, DOCX, Quarto websites, and books, including both page-local and continuous/global numbering modes.

Project and examples

• Repository: https://github.com/lsbjordao/quarto-reusable-footnotes
• Website example — page-local numbering: https://lsbjordao.github.io/examples/website
• Website example — global numbering: https://lsbjordao.github.io/examples/website-global
• Book example — page-local numbering: https://lsbjordao.github.io/examples/book
• Book example — global numbering: https://lsbjordao.github.io/examples/book-global
• First release (v0.1.0): https://github.com/lsbjordao/quarto-reusable-footnotes/releases/tag/v0.1.0

v0.1.0 is now available.