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Typedoc shouldn't warn that for a footnote that doesn't contain a link at all, the "file" that is the first word of it doesn't exist and won't be copied to output #2991
Description
Search terms
footnote, markdown-it, markdown-it-footnote, relative, link
Expected Behavior
Typedoc shouldn't warn about footnotes that don't contain links at all.
Actual Behavior
Typedoc seems to think that footnote markup will always contain a link -- but if it doesn't, if the footnote contains just a bunch of text, it appears it'll check for the existence of the "file" indicated by the first word in the text and then complain if it doesn't exist.
Steps to reproduce the bug
https://github.com/jswalden/typedoc-footnote-not-link
and then yarn install && yarn build:
jwalden@the-great-waldo-search:~/Code/typedoc-footnote-not-link$ yarn install && yarn build
➤ YN0000: · Yarn 4.9.2
➤ YN0000: ┌ Resolution step
➤ YN0000: └ Completed
➤ YN0000: ┌ Fetch step
➤ YN0000: └ Completed
➤ YN0000: ┌ Link step
➤ YN0000: └ Completed
➤ YN0000: · Done in 0s 340ms
./README.md:5:13 - [warning] The relative path This is not a file and will not be copied to the output directory
5 [^footnote]: This is a footnote.
[info] html generated at ./docs
[warning] Found 0 errors and 1 warnings
"This" is not a link, and the footnote shouldn't be treated like one. (Yes, Typedoc by default doesn't understand non-link footnotes -- but if you hook up markdown-it-footnote as this repository does, it can understand them. And to be clear, Typedoc produces this warning without markdown-it-footnote hooked up.)
Environment
- Typedoc version: 0.28.9
- TypeScript version: 5.8.3
- Node.js version: 22.17.1
- OS: Fedora Linux
tho I'm pretty sure this is a logic issue in the module and only the Typedoc version matters here.
Activity
Gerrit0 commentedon Aug 6, 2025
Yuck! This is going to be absolutely horrible to fix and honestly might end up as a wontfix. TypeDoc's relative link discovery happens before passing text to the markdown parser, so any plugins which modify link resolution like this one are essentially prevented from working.
I'm not sure there's a good way to change this which doesn't have other very undesirable consequences such as severely increasing the in memory and on disk (json) serialized model size and making it considerably more difficult for typedoc to maintain backwards compatibility for it's produced json files.
Gerrit0 commentedon Aug 9, 2025
... well, I could just make TypeDoc ignore reference blocks which look like they might be footnotes. I think that's a reasonably safe thing to do as it seems pretty unlikely that someone uses a reference with
^without intending it to be interpreted as a footnote.Do not parse markdown footnotes as references