Footnotes with italicized letters

Question

I would like to use italicized superscript letters for footnotes rather than numbers. How could I do this? Example:

This is text.^a And more text.^b

---

^a Footnote 1.

^b Footnote 2.

Answer 1

You can simply redefine the command \thefootnote which is responsible of the footnote superscript.

Either

\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\textit{\alph{footnote}}}

or

\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\emph{\alph{footnote}}}

should be fine (anyway don't use the latter if you're loading packages like ulem that redefine the meaning of \emph!):

\documentclass{article}

\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\textit{\alph{footnote}}}

\begin{document}

\section{Test}

This is text.\footnote{Footnote 1.} And more text.\footnote{Footnote 2.}

\end{document}