I posted a bug reporting that footnotes were not working within the columns shortcode. Joe Mooring replied that misbehavior was not a bug, but was caused by passing .Inner through .Page.RenderString. In the hugo-book theme, columns is defined as:
You posted that forum link the github bug too; I moved the conversation here in hopes of really understanding your answer. I found the doc on the difference between {{% columns %}} and {{< columns >}}. For the page in question, both ways of invoking the shortcode produce the same result, maybe because of $.Page.RenderString. If I remove $.Page.RenderString then the {{< completely breaks the rendering and {{% preserves the footnote but fails on {{< hint warning >}} and the literal HTML. So I understand that {{% seems like the correct approach, but is not sufficient. That’s why I suspected that there could be a better way to define the columns shortcode (above), but I’m not sure what to try.