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When having a comparatively large number of footnotes that are each very short (URLs say), it sometimes looks weird to have them stack up to a high footnote tower, especially in a minipage or some similarly confined space.

four URLs one under the other

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
\usepackage[hidelinks=true]{hyperref}
\newcommand{\footurl}[1]{\footnote{\url{#1}}}
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
As Linux Jabber clients there are for example Pidgin\footurl{http://www.pidgin.im/}, Kopete\footurl{http://kopete.kde.org/}, Gajim\footurl{http://gajim.org/} and Psi\footurl{http://psi-im.org/}.
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

Intuitively, I'd like to see these footnotes next to each other, like so:

2x2 footnotes

Is there any package that does this for me? Or any other way?

If at all possible I'd like not to go all two-columned with all my footnotes.

Edit

Just for reference, I'll show the two closest solutions so far. The first is the eledmac solution I linked to myself which can be used locally when not changing the \footnote command. It's not compatible with fnpct however. It can be made to work with fnpct with the excellent extension capabilities of this package, so the following image uses \AdaptNoteNoMult{\footnoteA}.

3+1 footnotes

The second is the solution suggested by jon which uses bigfoot and the para option. It is compatible with fnpct which I used in the following example but it inherits manyfoot's "feature" of escaping minipages so the length of the following example is still a huge understatement. It's also not properly aligned so it doesn't look satisfactory on its own.

2x2 but not aligned

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Christian
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  • And sorry for the footnotes and the punctuation. Yes, I do use fnpct in my actual document. – Christian Jun 13 '13 at 22:13
  • Have you considered using the footmisc package with the para option? – Mico Jun 14 '13 at 00:14
  • It seems that no footnote package can do what you are looking for out of the box. The closest is perhaps \usepackage[para]{bigfoot}\DeclareNewFootnote[para]{default}, which will use paragraphed notes except when bigfoot's underlying 'badness' algorithm decides that it would look to worse if the footnote in question is started on a new line. It is very impressive, but unfortunately it can't match manually placed mixed short and long footnotes you'll see in some academic publications. If only it could be extended to do (only) 1, 2, or 3 short notes per line. Way above my pay grade, though! – jon Jun 14 '13 at 05:07
  • @Mico Maybe I'm doing something wrong here but I had indeed tried \usepackage[para]{footmisc} but it didn't make any difference. – Christian Jun 14 '13 at 06:43
  • @jon I see ... it goes in the right direction indeed but looks quite ugly :/ – Christian Jun 14 '13 at 06:47
  • Yes, unfortunately, I don't find the setting very useful, though it seems a neat trick that could be improved on (just not by me). – jon Jun 14 '13 at 06:55
  • @jon Yeah, if the paragraph could somehow be made two-columned locally, that would be the desired output I guess. – Christian Jun 14 '13 at 06:58
  • have you considered the eledmac package? (see section 24.2) – d-cmst Jun 14 '13 at 07:11
  • @dcmst I just added an image showing the closest solutions, eledmac and bigfoot. I used the code I linked to for my eledmac "solution". If there is any way it can be modified to achieve the desired output, please let me know. – Christian Jun 14 '13 at 07:26
  • And just as a side-note, in my actual document eledmac does some weird sh...enanigans. It actually doubles every footnote but not even in an aabbcc fashion but abcabc. Crazy :) – Christian Jun 14 '13 at 08:57
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    i expect i could make a 2col option for footmisc, but it would never be ready to solve today's problem. if anyone else can do it "quickly" i'll happily merge the changes with the current release – wasteofspace Jun 14 '13 at 09:03
  • Then, if you had to suggest a single package able to create all kind of footnotes easily, which one would you pick, footmisc, yafoot, bigfoot...? – skan Nov 19 '16 at 12:31

1 Answers1

3

There is a package dblfnote which can do it for you. Because it is a little bit old there can be other problems occur (for your MWE there will come up an warning with option hidelinks of package hyperref. I commented the minipage in your MWE to get the wanted result.

New MWE:

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}

\usepackage{dblfnote}  % Two footnotes in one line      % <========== new
\DFNalwaysdouble       % sets footnote always double    % <========== new

\usepackage[hidelinks=true]{hyperref}

\newcommand{\footurl}[1]{\footnote{\url{#1}}}
\begin{document}
%\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}                            % <========== 
As Linux Jabber clients there are for example 
Pidgin\footurl{http://www.pidgin.im/}, 
Kopete\footurl{http://kopete.kde.org/}, Gajim\footurl{http://gajim.org/} 
and Psi\footurl{http://psi-im.org/}. 
%\end{minipage}                                          % <========== 
\end{document}

and the result is:

enter image description here

Mensch
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  • That's pretty cool but there are two bummers: that it doesn't work in minipages and that you can't switch it on and off. While "try single column" is the default, you still get footnotes that only use half the space available to them. I consider this double footnote thing a special case and it would be great if there was a package that doesn't touch footnotes at all unless a special command is used. It would even be understandable and okay if this package terribly crashed and burned and sold your grandmother when you mix normal and double footnotes on the same (mini)page. – Christian Oct 11 '13 at 19:50