Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!emory!mephisto!mcnc!duke!sunkst!ngs
From: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: non-numerical footnote marking
Keywords: footnotes, LaTex
Message-ID: <7908@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 23 Jul 90 19:25:12 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Reply-To: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 51

In article <20968@duke.cs.duke.edu>, ngs@sunkst.cs.duke.edu (Neil G. Sullivan) writes...
>I would like to mark a footnote in LaTeX with something other than a
>number.  I cannot find help in the manual, and nothing I have tried
>has worked.  The footnotemark and footnotetext commands appear to be
>no help, as footnotetext always seems to generate a number to precede
>the footnote at the bottom of the page.

First of all, since this is a minor stylistic change, you should
put the commands involved in the preamble (between \documentstyle
and \begin{document} of your document (this is to make it easy to
find when you need to change it back).

Now, for all automatically numbered items in a LaTeX document,
there is an associated counter whose name is usually the name of
the command or environment which generated the number sans the
backslash. Thus the section number is stored in the counter
section and the footnote number is stored in the counter
footnote.

Associated with each counter is a command \the<countername> which
is responsible for printing the value of the counter. For
example, the command to print the footnote numbeer is
\thefootnote.

p. 175 of the LaTeX manual lists the numbering commands supported
by LaTeX; these commands are generally used only in the
definition of a \the<something> command. For example, \thesection
is defined as \arabic{section}, \thesubsection is defined as
\thesection.\arabic{subsection} (do you understand why?) and so
forth.

To change the way that footnotes are renumbered, one simply
redefines \thefootnote: The following will change footnotes to be
numbered with "footnote symbols":
\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\fnsymbol{footnote}}

Exercise: change the definition of \footnote so that footnotes
are numbered with lower case letters.

Exercise for wizards: write the macros to allow footnotes to be
numbered with lower case GREEK letters (you'll need to write a
macro \greek with a syntax similar to that of the numbering
commands of p. 175).

-dh

---
Don Hosek                         TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont Consulting and
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