23

I have written my dissertation with LaTeX, but my teacher has suggested to put the number of footnotes in braces / parentheses. I thought it would be easy, but I haven't found the answer anywhere! I would like it to look as follows:

I would like (1) it to look like this.

(1) and not 1.

doncherry
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Rebecca
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  • 3
    To me: () are "parentheses" not braces. Braces would be {} or maybe []... – Seamus Jul 20 '11 at 15:10
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    Since you have some responses below that seem to answer your question, please consider marking one of them as ‘Accepted’ by clicking on the tickmark below their vote count. This shows which answer helped you most, and it assigns reputation points to the author of the answer (and to you!). – doncherry Oct 28 '11 at 17:15
  • @lockstep:
    I wouldn't've used {[tag:formatting]} here, but you did -- may I ask why? I'd use {[tag:punctuation]}, and I'm thinking about widening the scope of the question to include the variants you provided in your answer, in order to make it canonical. What do you think?     – doncherry Mar 28 '12 at 15:45
  • @doncherry Good idea -- [tag:formatting] is sort of a catch-all tag, but [tag:punctuation] is more appropriate here. – lockstep Mar 28 '12 at 15:46

3 Answers3

28

You can redefine the presentation of the footnote counter, for example:

\renewcommand*{\thefootnote}{(\arabic{footnote})}

This redefinition affects all occurences of footnote numbers, in the body text as well as in the footer area. I assume this is desired, keeping presentation consistent.

Stefan Kottwitz
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  • Would this affect just the body text footnotes or would the numbers in the footnotes themselves be affected too? If you wanted just the ones in the body text to change how would you do that? – Seamus Jul 20 '11 at 15:11
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    @Seamus: I don't see that Rebecca would like to treat the footnote number differently in body and footer, so I suggested a consistent way. If it would be the case, she could modify the question. Otherwise it might be a good new question on its own, I assume. Of course it's a good additional question by you. – Stefan Kottwitz Jul 20 '11 at 15:18
  • So this would modify both? – Seamus Jul 20 '11 at 15:26
  • Yes it modifies both, all footnote number occurences in the text. I will add this to the answer, so perhaps we could clean the comments a bit ;-) – Stefan Kottwitz Jul 20 '11 at 15:32
  • @StefanKottwitz It is giving error: Missing number, treated as zero. \footnotemark[\ref{note1}] – rudresh dwivedi May 17 '17 at 12:13
  • @rudreshdwivedi This does not happen in my code line. Perhaps you have a different issue with different code (reference in a footnote marker argument) and you could post it as a new question. – Stefan Kottwitz May 17 '17 at 12:15
10

In case you only want braces either in the text or in the footer area, I suggest to use the scrextend package (part of KOMA-script). See section 3.6.3 of the English documentation of KOMA-script for details about the \deffootnotemark and \deffootnote macros.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{scrextend}

% Footnote mark in text
\deffootnotemark{\textsuperscript{(\thefootnotemark)}}

% Footnote mark in footer
\deffootnote{2em}{1.6em}{(\thefootnotemark)\enskip}

\begin{document}

Some text.\footnote{A footnote.}

\end{document}
lockstep
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8

Standard document classes (like article and the like) typeset footnotes as a marker and text. The marker uses the footnote counter in terms of it's presentation. As such redefining this will redefine the way it displays. However, if you are only interested in modifying the marker display in the footnote itself and not in the actual text, you need to modify the footnote display function \@makefntext.

Using

\makeatletter\show\@makefntext\makeatother

produces

> \@makefntext=\long macro:
#1->\parindent 1em\noindent \hb@xt@ 1.8em{\hss \@makefnmark }#1

where #1 refers to the text of the footnote, and \@makefnmark refers to the typesetting of the actual footnote marker. Consequently, we can redefine this macro to suit our needs

\makeatletter%
\long\def\@makefntext#1{%
  \parindent 1em\noindent \hb@xt@ 1.8em{\hss \textsuperscript(\kern-0.1ex\@makefnmark\kern-0.1ex\textsuperscript)}#1}
\makeatother

which will produce regular footnote markers in the text (without brackets ( )) but bracketed footnote markers in the footnotes ( ). Here's an example of the differences/similarities:

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[paperheight=2in]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\makeatother
\begin{document}
This is a piece of text\footnote{This is the first footnote}. \par

\begingroup
\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{(\arabic{footnote})}% Modify footnote globally
This is a piece of text\footnote{This is the first footnote}. \par
\endgroup

\begingroup
\makeatletter%
\long\def\@makefntext#1{%
  \parindent 1em\noindent \hb@xt@ 1.8em{\hss \textsuperscript(\kern-0.1ex\@makefnmark\kern-0.1ex\textsuperscript)}#1}
This is a piece of text\footnote{This is the first footnote}.
\makeatother
\end{document}

Of course, using this approach, you can choose to use [ ] or { } as well if you'd like. geometry was only used to modify the page height for visual presentation.

Werner
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  • I would like the footnote markers in the actual footnote not to be superscripted, to save vertical space when there are many footnotes. Can anyone show me how to do this? (The scrextend method was a disaster; the exact code given above made my footnotes all overlap each other, so I would prefer just to redefine the @makefnmark macro.) – KeithB Nov 17 '19 at 12:00
  • @KeithB: So, all your footnotes should just be inline? Can you provide a minimal document that replicates your current setup? It should start with \documentclass and end with \end{document}. It'll help identify possible restrictions. – Werner Nov 17 '19 at 21:49