Short footnotes in columns

Question

When there are many short footnotes on one page, it looks bad to use a whole line for each. Classical typography solves this problem by arranging consecutive short footnotes in columns (the number of columns varying according to the number and order of short footnotes on each page). How would one do this in LaTeX?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{showframe}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{lll}
  $^1$\,First footnote.\kern .75in & $^2$\,Second.\kern .75in & $^3$\,Third.\kern .75in\\
  $^4$\,Fourth.\kern .75in         & $^5$\,Fifth.\kern .75in  & $^6$\,Sixth.\kern .75in
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

(I used \kern because I don’t know how to distribute columns horizontally evenly; but of course that is what should be done.)

When there is one or more footnotes on a page, that are considerably shorter than one line but longer than half a line, they should be centered and aligned.

Each footnote is a float, and as such has to take up an entire page (or column, but each column acts as a separate page). One would have to bypass the normal processing, yet still reserve space at the bottom of the page (one blank footnote which keeps getting bigger). — John Kormylo, Sep 09 '15 at 15:49
footmisc, manyfoot and bigfoot offer a "para"-footnote style. There is also dblfnote for twocolumn footnotes. See also http://www.ctan.org/topic/footnote — Ulrike Fischer, Sep 09 '15 at 15:54
I would have bet quite a bit that nobody has ever done this in print. If we ever meet, i'll get you a beer. I would never ever do it (at least for a serious document). — Johannes_B, Sep 09 '15 at 16:21
It can imho be done: Use a para style. Patch footnote so that is measures its argument, and then put them in sensible sized boxes. But it imho need quite some work to get all the details right (e.g. to get the footnotemarks at the correct places). And you will probably loose the ability of large footnotes to break across pages. — Ulrike Fischer, Sep 09 '15 at 16:25
@Lawrence sorry but really you did not explain what you want well. Now, this is some thing else. — touhami, Sep 09 '15 at 16:35
Maybe the way to go is to have two kinds of footnotes: short three word footnotes, and longer ones. The author has to decide, which one is needed, so we have \footnoteA and \footnoteB, which both use the same counter for numbering the footnotes. — Keks Dose, Sep 09 '15 at 19:39

touhami · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-09T19:05:03.167

4

Here is a solution

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\usepackage[para*]{manyfoot}
\DeclareNewFootnote[para]{A}
\let\oldfootnoteA\footnoteA
\renewcommand{\footnoteA}[1]{%
\oldfootnoteA{\makebox[.32\dimexpr\textwidth-2\footglue\relax][l]{#1}}} % adjust .305\textwidth


\begin{document}

Hello\footnoteA{This is some text.}
World\footnoteA{And footnote.}.

\lipsum[1]

Hello\footnoteA{This is some.}
World\footnoteA{And footnote.}.

\lipsum[1]

Hello\footnoteA{This is some.}
World\footnoteA{And footnote.}.

\end{document}

edited Sep 09 '15 at 19:05

answered Sep 09 '15 at 16:29

touhami

19,520

Nice! Why exactly .305\textwidth ? – Toothrot Sep 09 '15 at 16:37
@Lawrence this to be adjusted. normally it's 1/3=.33333.... but there is some extrat space separe footnote so. One can compute the exact value. – touhami Sep 09 '15 at 16:40
Doesn't work, unfortunately, just put \lipsum into one of the footnotes and you'll see. Why don't you (Lawrence) just stick to the out-of-the-box solution of bigfoot? You get the bigfoot manual by texdoc bigfoot on the command line. Footnote issues are ... complicated. – Keks Dose Sep 09 '15 at 17:41
@KeksDose you're right. But here the question title Short footnotes in columns – touhami Sep 09 '15 at 18:37
1

@Lawrence i edited my answer .305\textwidth replaced with .32\dimexpr\textwidth-2\footglue\relax – touhami Sep 09 '15 at 19:06
where is big footnote (in image ^1 footnote is long 3 columst) – Marek Kaski Aug 06 '17 at 08:44
@MarekKaski please read comments :-) – touhami Aug 06 '17 at 09:25

Short footnotes in columns

1 Answers1

Linked