By Cathy Sarisky, Ghost Expert in Footnotes — Nov 7, 2025

Another way to footnote in Ghost

Drafty demo, but feel free to check it out.

I've been fairly happy with my approach to footnotes for web¹, but it falls flat in email and on ActivityPub.

I've known for a while that copy and paste into Ghost occasionally yields formatting that isn't really supported by the built-in editor, including superscripts. Today, I'll show you how to take advantage of that, to produce better-formatted footnotes, without too much fuss.

Not interested in how it works? That's fine, just head on over to the footnotes tool² and try it out.

How it works

While cutting and pasting superscripts works, and cutting and pasting links works, id tags (needed for native jump links) do not work. They get stripped.

So here's what I settled on: I paste a link with an href (destination) that includes the footnote's number, like "https://{link-to-your-article}#fn2". This causes newsletter clicks to bring the reader to your newsletter.

more stuff

more stuff more stuff

more stuff (if there isn't more stuff, you can't see the scroll effect)

How's it look in email? Like this! 👇

What happens when you click a footnote in email? It takes the user to the website. I consider this more of a feature than a bug. It even scrolls to the right spot.

Want to try it out? 👉Here's the app! 👈