Read footnotes where they belong: right beside the sentence.
What this tool does
This tool turns pasted footnoted text into a readable page where hovering a footnote marker shows its note. You paste the text with markers like [^1] and list the notes below as numbered lines, and the tool replaces each marker with a highlighted number whose hover preview holds the full note. Footnotes stop being a trip to the bottom of the page and become part of the sentence they belong to.
It works fully in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, and you do not need an account. Paste your text, press the button, and read the result on the same page. That makes it useful for students, researchers, and anyone who has to get through a long paper quickly without losing the important parts.
How to use it
Paste your text, keeping markers in the form [^1], [^2], and so on, then add one line per note in the form number, colon, note text. Press the preview button and hover each highlighted number to read its note in place. If a marker shows no note, check that its number matches a note line exactly.
Worked example
A sentence saying sleep improves recall with a marker [^1], plus a note line giving Walker (2009) and a 23 percent gain in rested students, becomes a sentence with a highlighted 1 that previews the Walker finding on hover. The reader gets the evidence without leaving the sentence, which is how footnotes should work in digital reading.
How to read the results
The output is your text with highlighted footnote numbers, each carrying its note as a hover preview, plus a note explaining the interaction. Notes are matched by number, so a text with five markers and five note lines previews all five, and any unmatched marker is labelled with its number rather than silently dropped.
Do not treat the output as a final answer. It is a starting point for your own reading. Skim the highlighted parts first, then read the full passage around anything that matters for your work. A tool can point at the likely important sentences, but only you can judge whether they are actually important for your question.
Honest limits
Hover previews depend on your device: touch screens have no hover, so on a phone the preview appears only as a tap-and-hold tooltip in some browsers, and may not appear at all in others. The tool also only handles numbered notes in the stated format, not symbols, endnotes in separate files, or notes embedded in images. For a durable annotated document, a word processor’s real footnotes remain the better format.
This tool does not use artificial intelligence, and it does not understand your paper the way a human reader does. It follows fixed rules that you can inspect in the results. That is a strength when you want transparent, repeatable results, and a weakness when a passage needs real understanding, context, or judgement.
Tips for best results
Paste clean text. Remove page headers, footers, and reference lists before you paste, because they add noise to word counts and sentence scores. Work on one section at a time for long papers, and keep your original file open beside the tool so you can check anything surprising against the source. If you use the result in your own writing, always cite the original paper, never the tool output.
Frequently asked questions
Is it free? Yes. The tool is free to use online, with no sign-up and no download.
Is my text stored anywhere? No. Everything runs in your browser tab. Closing the tab removes your pasted text.
Can I trust the output completely? No tool of this kind should be trusted blindly. Use it to speed up reading and checking, then verify the important claims yourself in the original text.
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Versión en español: Vista Previa de Notas al Pie · All Free Online Tools.
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