Lowering footnote positioning but keeping main text the same

Question

Very new to Latex but I have been searching these forums for a long time and could not find a solution to this problem. Here is a minimal sample page to illustrate my problem:

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\fancyhf{}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

This is some\footnote{This is a footnote} text.
\lipsum[1-20]

\end{document}

If we inspect the footnote, you can see that there is a lot of space between it and the bottom of the page.

I would like to move the footnote lower down, without affecting the rest of the text. Ideally, it would look like this:

So far I have tried to make the footnotes stick with \usepackage[bottom]{footmisc} but this does note reduce the huge bottom margin - it only forces the footnote to the bottom of the area if there is not enough text above it.

I have also tried to manually decrease the footer height while padding the footnote-to-text space, with these commands:

\usepackage[bottom=1in]{geometry}
\setlength{\skip\footins}{1in}

Which gives the desired effect but has the unfortunate side-effect of shifting the main text down on pages without footnotes (as well as messing up all the margins...).

The \footskip command has also not yielded the desired results and I'm not sure what else to do.

Answer 1

I really don't like what you are trying to do as the space below the main text should be consistent. However, for your particular example (I haven't tried to tidy up my code)

% footnoteprob.tex  SE 564168
\documentclass[]{article}

%\setlength{\footskip}{1in}

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\fancyhf{}
\pagestyle{plain}

%\setlength{\footskip}{1in}
%\setlength{\footins}{1in}

%\setlength{\footnotesep}{1in}

\renewcommand{\footnoterule}{%
  \vspace{1in}
  \kern-3pt
  \hrule width 0.4\columnwidth
  \kern 2.6pt}
  
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
The \verb!\skip\footins! is \the\skip\footins
%\setlength{\skip\footins}{1in}

The footskip is \the\footskip

\enlargethispage{2\baselineskip}
This is some\footnote{This is a footnote} text.
\lipsum[1-20]

\end{document}

I have changed the placement of the \footnoterule and increased the textheight to take account of the footnote being moved below the textblock leaving a couple of blank lines behind.

Do you really want to screw up LaTeX's typesetting paradigm?