Template:Ran/doc

Using Rma and Ran allows editors to control the order in which references are listed (alphabetical, divided into groups, etc.), and to manually assign the reference "tags" (e.g. in the examples below).

Rma
Creates a "reference, manually anchored", with layout matching the output of the usual  machinery. It is typically used in a References or similar section of an article. Its syntax is borrowed to some extent from wikicite. Example

outputs

The  (for example) is the "manual anchor" – any string (preferably very short) assigned to the referenced work, and by which it will be referred later (typically using ran). The Smith source can then be referenced from article text using  (see below).

Citation templates such as cite book are not required; the following example uses "free text":

This outputs

The default width of the tags column is 20px. If some of the tags are bigger than that, the tw parameter can be used to set a larger "tag width"; the same tw value should be used with all invocations of rma in the article so that all tags line up evenly.

Ran
Creates a superscript "callout" (visually similar to the usual callouts generated by ) to a source which is cited elsewhere in the article using rma. Example:

or

would appear in the article thus:
 * Smith disagrees.

(Click on the superscript to see how the linking operates.)

Like rp (and r for that matter), ran also accepts a page parameter:

or

would appear as:
 * Smith disagrees.

(page has a shorthand alias p parameter. For plural pages pages and pp can be used instead, and for other in-source-locations use at or loc. ama and y[es] can be used to switch the display format.)

Also like rp and r, ran supports optional quote/q, code/name/code/name, trans-quote/tq and n[o]/y[es]/f[orced] parameters. If the quote page are not the same as the pages specified through one of the pages parameters above, quote-page/qp and quote-pages/qpp can be used to override those values. The parameters needed, reason and date of the Page needed template are supported as well.

Back links
Unlike Wikipedia's  tags, ran does not create a link back from the footnote. If you follow this superscript link, you will not see any links back to the superscript "callout". This is useful in places where backlinks are either not possible or not useful.

For example, a list, glossary, or biography may cite the same source throughout the entire article. Compare the backlinks generated by these named references:

To the usage of the same number of ran templates:

Error messages
Editors who have installed User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js (or a similar script) may see errors such as

because Citation Style 1 templates like cite book and citation generate CITEREF anchors that the script expects to be linked from short citations within the article. There is typically no reason to worry about such messages in References sections; see User:Ucucha/HarvErrors for more details. Only readers logged in, and with the .js just mentioned installed, will see this message, so this isn't as big a deal as it may seem. This can be suppressed by adding none, as in: