setzer

believerinsight,

This is a CSS issue and can be fixed. The sidenote list needs a wider left margin in order to display the full double-digit numerals. Try adding the following custom CSS rule to your site:

ol.side-matter-list {
    margin-left: 3em;
}

If you’re not sure how to add that to your site, I suggest installing a custom user CSS plugin (like the Custom CSS module included with Jetpack) and pasting the above code into the custom CSS field.

OK, looks like Twenty Twelve’s default CSS is interfering more than I thought. Try this version instead:

.widget-area .widget .side-matter p, .widget-area .widget li.side-matter {
    line-height: 1.2;
}

Hi halfon,

This can be done using CSS. The current line-height property of your sidenotes is set to 1.846153846 in line 630 of your theme stylesheet (link).

Adding the following CSS rule to your site should do the trick (change the value of line-height as needed):

ol.side-matter > li.side-matter > div.side-matter-text {
    line-height: 1.2;
}

You could append this rule to the stylesheet directly, but I suggest instead adding it with a custom CSS plugin (like the one included in Jetpack) so your additions are preserved even if the theme is updated.

Think this is an IE-specific issue with the li type attribute. This will be fixed in the next plugin release.

OK, that makes the problem clearer. It looks like IE does not display a link’s title attribute on hover if the link contains child tags (in this case, a sup element). Thanks for bringing this to my attention; I’ll fix the issue in the next Side Matter release.

Hi ondraslosar,

The link you provided seems to be a dead link now, so I’ll need a little more information to help you. Are your sidenotes showing up and in the correct position, or is it something else?

One known issue with IE is that sidenote numerals are displaying as bullets in some cases instead of numbers or letters; this should be fixed in the next release.

believerinsight,

That’s strange. In that case, it must not be theme-related. No idea why the note numeral would display as a bullet even in the settings preview field. Do <ol> HTML tags (ordered lists) always show up like this for you, or just with Side Matter?

Sorry to hear that didn’t work. Reproducing Word formatting on the Web is a real headache, and I can’t even guess at the complications EndNote would add.

I’d like to help more, but my own knowledge of macros/Word batch-editing is not vast. You might try asking about this at a forum dedicated to Word questions and support — lots of experts out there who might volunteer to write you a script.

I do think a Word macro is still your best shot — certainly preferable to doing it all manually. I don’t think there’s a WordPress plugin out there that can readily manipulate your post content in this way, at least right now.

Pirate Jenny,

I think you can avoid doing it by hand. My suggestion is to use a Word macro that converts the endnotes in your documents to inline text and wraps them in Side Matter’s [ref] tags. From there, you could use the ‘Paste from Word’ button in WP’s Visual Editor.

This should be fairly straightforward even if you’re not familiar with Word macros. A Google search for ‘word macro convert endnotes to inline text’ turns up a number of user-written macros you could use as a base. This one would be a great place to start. Changing the 4 lines that read

Selection.Text = "<" + szFootNoteText + ">"
Selection.InsertParagraphBefore
Selection.InsertParagraphAfter
Selection.Font.Bold = wdToggle

to:

Selection.Text = "[ref]" + szFootNoteText + "[/ref]"

should make it work with Side Matter.

Not sure if it matters to Word whether your citations are configured as footnotes or endnotes — if it does, you may need to convert them to footnotes before running that particular macro.

Hi believerinsight,

That sounds like a theme CSS issue. I’m guessing your theme’s stylesheet includes some variation of the following rule:

ol {
    list-style-type: disc;
}

What theme are you using? I might be able to point you to a more specific fix if it is a publicly available theme (or if you can link to your site).

lugoo, sorry for the belated response. I took a look at your site the other day, and it looks like you were using the theme Twenty Eleven, which (similar to the above) does not include a sidebar on posts/pages and so won’t show Side Matter notes.

Twenty Twelve and Thematic should definitely work, though – let me know if you are still having trouble with those themes.

lugoo,

That’s strange. The plugin should work with those themes.

Are the sidenotes appearing at all? If not, make sure you’ve placed the SM widget in your sidebar using the Widgets admin screen. They should show up if the widget is active.

If the sidenotes are appearing but not getting aligned with their references, it’s probably a Javascript issue.

Can you provide a link to your site? It would be helpful to see exactly what’s appearing or not appearing.

Hi lugoo,

It looks like the TDSimple theme does not include a sidebar, just a fixed pop-out drawer for widgets. The plugin needs a theme with a true sidebar in order to position and display sidenotes properly.

The theme developer may add a traditional sidebar to TDSimple in the future — you could ask them. Alternatively, you can use one of the various footnote plugins that do not need a sidebar (e.g. WP-Footnotes).

halfon,

It looks like your problem is caused by an unnecessarily general selector in the Creativix theme stylesheet. The theme is telling your site to style all sidebar links in block format with icon/underline. (You can find the selector in question on line 768 of /wp-content/themes/wp-creativix/style.php.)

Since you’re already using a child theme for your site’s appearance, changing the links back to normal shouldn’t be too complicated. Add the following code to the bottom of the file wp-content/themes/wp-creativix-child/style.css:

ol.side-matter-list > li.side-matter-note > div.side-matter-text a {
    border-bottom: none;
    display: inline;
    padding: 0;
    background: none;
}

Hope this helps!

I’m glad it works! You have a good point about maintaining custom CSS across update. By default, WordPress does overwrite the old plugin files with the latest version.

One option, for the time being, is to add the custom CSS to your current theme’s stylesheet instead of side-matter.css. However, know that this may result in the same issue when the theme is upgraded.

Now that most formatting issues have been ironed out, I’d like the plugin to preserve custom CSS on update in future versions — shouldn’t be too much work to make it happen.