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I have an org-mode file with more than 12000 footnotes (maybe less), I was cleaning it and found that after the conversion some footnotes weren't converted to org-mode footnotes, so I had to manually make them footnotes.

The thing is, since that addition the reference number inside the square brackets must be re-done otherwise I will end with repeated numbers, like: [12] ... [12] or [10678] ... [10678]. Is there a way to build a regexp that look for all numbers inside square brackets and replace the text inside them with their respective coincidence number (?) for instance: [12] is the coincidence number 10 and this other [12] is coincidence number 11 so [12] ... [12] becomes [10] ... [11]?

especial petition: if you are going to post an elisp snippet that solves this problem, please, please, please, comment it on detail because I want to learn elisp too!

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  • They are references, so must we expect that the number references to somewhere? I.e. in your situation, there are 4 occurrences of [12], two of them (reference + footnote) should be renamed [10] and the other two should be renamed [11]? That makes the question much more difficult than the way it is currently phrased!
    – T. Verron
    Dec 4, 2014 at 7:45
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    How many of your references are duplicates? If not too many, I'd suggest de-duplicating them by hand, using a different namespace (e.g. [12-2]) to avoid the numbering issue.
    – T. Verron
    Dec 4, 2014 at 7:46
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    Using the [fn:name] syntax rather than hand numbering is a better long term solution.
    – Andrew Swann
    Dec 4, 2014 at 7:47
  • The references will be worked on separate files to make things easy. They aren't many, though I'm worried about how will [12-2] looks after exporting the document ...
    – shackra
    Dec 4, 2014 at 7:56
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    Also, if you drop your requirement about learning Elisp, you can probably employ keyboard macros together with the keyboard macro counter (if that is what it's called, see the manual) and `C-u C-s' within a macro.
    – mbork
    Dec 4, 2014 at 18:13

1 Answer 1

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To re-number all footnotes starting from 1 you can use M-x query-replace-regexp (or, if you're feeling confident, just M-x replace-regexp) and type in

\[[0-9]+\] as the regexp to replace and

[\,(1+ \#)] as the replacement.

Here \# is the match count starting from zero, so I used \, and a lisp form which adds one to it.

To get (most of) this information, press C-h f replace-regexp and hit RETURN.

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  • Wow! This works perfectly! Is just a matter of separating the footnotes and putting it on a different file before using replace-regexp!
    – shackra
    Dec 4, 2014 at 18:31

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