David Kastrup writes:
 > Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]> writes:
 > 
 > > Turned out that the whole thing was more tricky than I first imagined,
 > > but it is obvious once you think about it. In fact, I don't think that
 > > there is any footnote package around that handles footnotes that are
 > > not tied to the column width right now.
 > 
 > I think that multicol.sty did something like that (single-column
 > footnote block) by default.  

true, but single column layout for the footnotes is only a boarder case, the
general case would be multicolumn footnotes with different numbers of columns
compared to the number of text columns.

and more importantly multicol was not handling floats

 > I think combining it with bigfoot.sty got
 > rid of the "footnote on wrong page" problem haunting multicol.sty, too.

quite possible. unfortunately i would be very surprised if one could hook
bigfoot on top of the xor output routines without some larger changes

frank