How do I change the footnote style of \thanks to a letter?

Question

I need to have a lowercase superscript letter for the footnote for the author, that is, I need the \thanks command to have footnote a as opposed to *. I'm assuming that I either need to use an option in the \thanks command or redefine footnote and then use \footnote. I've made various attempts but so far have had no luck.

My document class is article.

Answer 1

The titling package allows you to adjust the \maketitle and \thanks commands. To use letters instead of symbols for the title footnotes, you would issue \thanksmarkseries{alph}:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{titling}

\thanksmarkseries{alph}
\author{N.E. One\thanks{With generous help from E. Veryone}}
\title{Of Odds and End}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}

Answer 2

There are probably many ways to achieve this, but one of the easier ones must be to load the titling package and to issue the command \thanksmarkseries{alph} in the preamble.