Incompatibility between the `footnote` and `xcolor` packages

Question

The following code fails to build:

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage{footnote}
\usepackage{xcolor}

\begin{document}

\chapter{My first chapter}

\parbox{110mm}{
Here is a footnote\footnote{The footnote is here}.
Where is my footnote?
}

\end{document}

The error produced is:

! Extra }, or forgotten \endgroup.
<argument> ...@finalstrut \strutbox }\fn@endnote }

l.13 }

If I remove the footnote package, the footnote is not exported outside of the parbox, and I need the xcolor package to produce gray lettrines somewhere else in the document.

Is that a know bug? How can I circumvent it?

Answer 1

Load footnote after xcolor. footnote contains a \let\fn@endnote\color@endgroup, this give the wrong result if xcolor hasn't been loaded yet (xcolorredefines \color@endgroup).

Answer 2

use a minipage instead of the parbox:

\begin{minipage}{110mm}
Here is a footnote\footnote{The footnote is here}.
Where is my footnote?
\end{minipage}

Answer 3

You could try to combination of \footnotemark and \footnotetext to avoid having the footnote inside the \parbox. This works for you example, but is actually some technique the footnote package tries to avoid.

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage{footnote}
\usepackage{xcolor}

\begin{document}

\chapter{My first chapter}

\parbox{110mm}{
Here is a footnote\footnotemark.
Where is my footnote?
}
\footnotetext{The footnote is here}.

\end{document}

See also this TeX FAQ which is more about footnotes in tables, but partially also applies here.