How can I leave every page half-blank at the bottom – with footnotes still at the very bottom?

Question

I want every page of my document to be half-empty at the bottom, so I have plenty of space for annotations without sacrificing horizontal space. However, I still want footnotes to appear at the very bottom of the document.

In other words, I want to control a space between the body of my document and the foot. But according to the {geometry} package, …

… there is none. I think I’d need the equivalent of headsep for the foot, but there is none.

Question. Can I still get what I want?

Possible duplicate of https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/532162/how-to-have-footnote-below-page-number — John Kormylo, May 03 '20 at 14:22
@JohnKormylo: I don't think it is a duplicate. footmisc[bottom] puts things at the bottom of the text block. But OP wants the footnotes to go below there. — Paul Stanley, May 03 '20 at 14:54

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered May 03 '20 at 14:52

This is surprisingly tricky!

One technique is to play a game with \footnoterule. Normally that is designed to take up no space. But you can deliberately set it up to insert space and therefore move the footnotes down below the bottom of the text block.

Something like (you would need to play with the values). The additional footskip is to make sure the page number also moves low on the page.

\newgeometry{bmargin=0.65\textheight,footskip=3.4in}
\renewcommand{\footnoterule}{%
  \vspace*{3in}
  \hrule width 2in
  \kern 2.6pt
 }

How can I leave every page half-blank at the bottom – with footnotes still at the very bottom?

1 Answers1