Frank, > > >well, current latex already has two for \footnotetext (one being the text > > >and > > >one being the number to use or \NoValue) > > > > I would rather have thought that the number should be taken from a counter > > that was managed by the template itself, i.e., the template has one key for > > name of counter to use and some of the keys which control formatting should > > (indirectly) refer to this counter. This makes more sense to me, since > > there is no point in having footnote numbers assigned in any other way than > > in sequence. > >right, that would be the normal case, but you might want to allow to have via >user manipulation offer to manually freeze the counter value. however in most >cases the value passed would indeed be \NoValue indicating to use the internal >counter. A technical case where I later realized it might be needed is that of footnotes saved for later typesetting by the template. In that case the number has already been assigned. [snip] > > On the other hand, I have now managed to come up with something which, if > > it is to be handled by footnote templates, definately should become an > > additional argument to the template. Consider the situation that a LaTeX > > document containing footnotes is to be typeset as some sort of hypertext. > > What is then the most convenient (for the reader) thing to do with the > > footnotes? I would think it is to make links for them (click on the link, > > get the footnote text on screen). The clickable area of a link in hypertext > > is, by convention, longer than the one or two characters used for a > > footnote number, and hence a footnote template that typesets footnotes this > > way would need an additional "text to make the link text" argument. > >that is an interesting one. > >let's forget for a second the template side of this, how would you consider >providing an interface for that on the LaTeX level? > >this is a serious \footnote[question]{Like this? which would of course be >incompatible with the current interface.} Perhaps. But I suspect that a more likely setup is that such linkfootnotes would be handled by some special command (\lfootnote ?) and the ordinary \footnote would make the number the link text. >---------------------------- > >here are two more which i was wondering if they should get included: > >- should refid attributes be passed as arguments, eg instead of the current > custom in LaTeX which requires something like > \footnote{\label{foo} ...} > pass a label name via one argument to the template (how or if this is > implemented on the LaTeX user front end would be a different matter) Is this a grouping thing in current LaTeX? In general it seems to be possible to handle at the user level command level, i.e., \footnote could say \UseInstance{footnote} ... % Contains \refstepcounter \label{#n} >- more something to solve a technical problem (because it is rather difficult > in TeX): have one argument that is a boolean and states that the current > footnote is one in a row of footnotes which belong together > example: > > text text\footnote{first}\footnote{second} > >in most case this would be supposed to come out as > > 1, 2 > text text > >and not as > > 12 > text text > >as it would in current LaTeX. This is an interesting one! It touches another difficulty regarding link footnotes, namely that there may be punctuation which should be placed between the text made a link and the footnote number. Anyway, I think the boolean Frank suggests here should definately be an argument of footnote templates. [snip] Lars Hellström