How to target footnote reference numbers with a lua filter?

[ahharvey]

If I want to apply a custom style to footnotes generated in a pandoc document, I can do something like this:

function Note(el)
    return pandoc.Div(el.content, {['custom-style'] = 'Footnote Text'})
end

But what if I want to apply a custom style to the in-text and footer reference number that denotes each footnote?

function WhatIsTheElement(el)
    return pandoc.Span(el.content, {['custom-style'] = 'Footnote Reference'})
end

What is the name of the element that I should be targeting? After much reading through the docs, I must be missing something.

[badumont]

This is something you must do directly in your word processor. If I remember well, no style is associated with the footnote reference, but you can customize it from the menu.

[ahharvey]

yes, i wanted to avoid doing this in the word processor. currently pandoc is generating reference numbers that are not superscripted. it is not ideal to manually apply the style to each reference when the document becomes long. but it seems that there is no way to target the reference number with a filter, correct?

[wlupton]

I assume that you're referring to the reference numbers in the list of footnotes? At least in the HTML output, the in-text numbers are already superscripted, right?

I think this is down to the writer. With the HTML writer I see this, so I think you could define CSS tied to the footnotes class, perhaps based on the ideas here. If you need a more general solution, I don't know...

% pandoc <<<'text^[note]'
<p>text<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1"
role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<section id="footnotes" class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document"
role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p>note<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back"
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>

[ahharvey]

Both the list of footnotes, and the in-text numbers are not superscripted. Interesting to learn for HTML footnote references are properly tagged with <sup>, thanks. I am writing to a docx file from an Rmarkdown source. I will do some more testing to try to figure out what is going on. Its possible that an R package is interfering with this in some way.

[badumont]

Good news, the style already exists: it is called “Footnote Characters”. You can customize it in a reference document.

[ahharvey]

Very useful to learn this, thanks. I will look into this and report back. But if I wanted to change “Footnote Characters” (for example, to apply a style name required by a company template), it sounds like there is no way to do this. Correct?

[badumont]

But if I wanted to change “Footnote Characters” (for example, to apply a style name required by a company template), it sounds like there is no way to do this. Correct?

To automatize this, I fear that you would have to unzip the DOCX file, replace the relevant parts with e.g. sed and zip it again.