5

This question relates to one of my earlier questions: biblatex footnote references

At the start of my thesis I have an acknowledgements page. This page contains some references, but it is my preference to have these listed in a short bibliography at the bottom of the same page as a footer rather than bundle it all up at the end of the thesis. I'm using the numeric [#] style references.

I had done my references with natbib, using footbib to handle the footnote citations. The command for placing them is \footcite{<key>}. I'm now trying to migrate over to biblatex. biblatex also has a \footcite{<key>} command, but it behaves differently, placing a [#] in the foot bibliography, (and nothing else). I'm trying to find a sensible way to implement the functionality I want and have made some progress:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage[sorting=none,
           style=chem-rsc,
           %style=footnote-dw
           ]{biblatex}
\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{theRefs.bib}
@MISC{MatStudio2005,
  author = {{Accelrys Software Inc.}},
  title = {Material Studio 4.0},
  year = {2005},
  owner = {Administrator},
  timestamp = {2010.07.02}
}

@ARTICLE{Momma2008,
  author = {Momma, Koichi and Izumi, Fujio},
  title = {VESTA: a three-dimensional visualization system for electronic and
    structural analysis},
  journal = {Journal of Applied Crystallography},
  year = {2008},
  volume = {41},
  pages = {653-658},
  number = {3},
  month = {6},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{theRefs.bib}
\newcommand{\footnoteNS}[1]{{\let\thefootnote\relax\footnote{#1}}}

\begin{document}

\chapter*{acknowledgements}
    \begin{refsection}

        Things I would like to acknowledge \cite{Momma2008,MatStudio2005}

        \renewcommand{\bibfont}{\normalfont\footnotesize}
        \footnoteNS{\vspace{-\baselineskip}\printbibliography[heading=none]}
%       \footnoteNS{\printbibliography[heading=none]}

    \end{refsection}
\end{document}

This kind of works, but is rather horribly inelegant. Particularly if you look at the \vspace that I had to add to remove a space between the footer and the horizontal rule. Also, though it looks acceptable, the space between rule and bibliography is still not quite right (should be less).

Can any one suggest ways forwards with this, giving consideration that I wish the references in the rest of the document operate with the current style but independently of the Acknowledgement (as if it wasn't there). This consideration is dealt with in the working example, but I could easily imagine suggestions that affect the rest of the document.

Sorry if some aspect of this is not clear. I will try to amend if I have written confusing things.

Community
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aghsmith
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  • If this is of any help: if I change the style to "authoryear" the footnote citation does show up. – Legolas Sep 23 '11 at 17:13
  • Cheers, I figured something like that would work, but I wasn't going for that style of citation. – aghsmith Sep 24 '11 at 11:50
  • @aghsmith Further details might help get this question answered. Is anything cited more than once? If so, what is the desired behaviour? Are there other types of footnotes used? Should citation footnote numbers match the labelnumbers ([#]) used in the rest of the thesis, or can they be independent? – Audrey Sep 24 '11 at 21:24
  • @Audrey, thanks. I do use \footnote{<some text>} elsewhere in the thesis. I would like this footnote to have no symbol, other than the numbers in the bibliography itself. I'd like it to be completely independent of the numbering used for the rest of the footnotes. The \footnoteNS{} command that I created, removes the symbols, I'm not sure if it removes the footnote counter as well. I guess I can look into this. – aghsmith Sep 24 '11 at 22:09
  • @aghsmith I actually should have had a closer look at your code before commenting. Looks like you just need some refinements. I'll post some shortly. – Audrey Sep 25 '11 at 02:37

2 Answers2

5

One way around the spacing problem is to define a bibliography heading based on \footnoterule.

The code below demonstrates this approach. This solution will need to be adapted if the footnote rule is generated using some other command defined by, say, another package or document class.

Thanks to aghsmith for improving this answer.

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage[style=chem-rsc,sorting=none]{biblatex}

% Define bibheading by the replacement text of \footnoterule
\edef\bibrule{\footnoterule}
\defbibheading{rule}{\bibrule}

\newcommand{\printbibliographyfootnote}{%
   \let\thefootnote\relax% Suppress footnote mark
   \renewcommand{\bibfont}{\normalsize\footnotesize}% Change bibliography font
   \footnotetext[0]{\printbibliography[heading=rule]}}

\newenvironment{acknowledgements}
  {\let\footnoterule\relax% Suppress footnote rule
   \chapter*{Acknowledgements}
   \begin{refsection}}
  {\end{refsection}
   \clearpage}% Force footnote to be printed before leaving environment

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}

\begin{acknowledgements}
Citations.\supercite{companion,bertram}
More citations.\supercite{knuth:ct:a,knuth:ct:b,knuth:ct:c}
\printbibliographyfootnote
\end{acknowledgements}

\chapter{Chapter title}
Chapter citations \cite{bertram,aristotle:poetics,companion}.
Vanilla footnote.\footnote{Footnote text}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Here is the resulting footnote bibliography:

enter image description here

And the footnote in the following chapter:

enter image description here

Note that the space between the bibliography and the rule isn't nearly as tight as it is for regular footnotes. Spacing could be adjusted by redefining the bibheading.

Audrey
  • 28,881
  • Thanks for this answer @Audrey. I've spent a long time trying to understand... much of the latex was new to me. Now I understand much more. I have a question though. It seems inelegant to have: \bbx@makefntext and \printbibliographyfootnote as separate macros, especially as they work with internal macros. I tried replacing them with: \newcommand{\printbibliographyfootnote}{{% \let\thefootnote\relax \renewcommand{\bibfont}{\normalsize\footnotesize} \footnotetext{\printbibliography[heading=rule]}}}

    which seems to have worked. Am I missing a point? Thanks

     – aghsmith Sep 25 '11 at 20:15
  • @aghsmith No, I don't think so. I'm sure there are other ways to make the solution more robust/elegant. Please feel free to edit my post. I wouldn't mind making improvements on your behalf, but I think you deserve the rep. – Audrey Sep 25 '11 at 20:53
  • Okay I've done this and added some cometary, hope that's all right. I don't have edit privileges yet, so someone needs to review it. – aghsmith Sep 26 '11 at 17:52
  • @aghsmith Looks good overall - sorry I didn't annotate the code myself. There's another obvious improvement. I'll post it in a minute. – Audrey Sep 26 '11 at 18:39
2

I appreciate Audrey's answer and learnt much from it, though the solution I went for in my own work was not so far away from what I had originally. I was not entirely happy with the modification of internal latex macros as in Audrey's idea. This one compiles without warnings.

I created the following command, based partially on Audrey's ideas and partially on mine (and a lot of fiddling):

\newcommand{\printbibliographyfootnote}{{%
   % The \footnotemark[<number>] marks the page to put the footnote on. 
   % Using it suppresses a hyperref warning about a missing anchor.
   % [0] does not have a symbol when using the \fnsymbol{<counter>} set.
    \footnotemark[0]
   % Replace \thefootnote with nothing. 
   % \thefoonote produces the marker for both the text and in footnote.
    \let\thefootnote\relax 
   % change bibliography font to \footnotesize
    \renewcommand{\bibfont}{\normalfont\footnotesize}
   % Produce a footnote, without incrementing the counter for footnotes.
    \footnotetext[0]{%          
        \vspace{-1.5\baselineskip}\printbibliography[heading=none]
    }%
}}%

I found the \vspace{<length>} used here does quite a nice job in terms of matching the correct footer spacing.

aghsmith
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