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I was wandering if there's a way to make only one footnote appear with a symbol (*) instead of the number.

Thanks!!!

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    Welcome to TeX.SX! You can have a look at our starter guide to familiarize yourself further with our format. – Speravir Feb 6 '14 at 18:07
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    Please also have a look at Symbols instead of numbers as footnote markers – in the comments to Stefan’s answer, you’ll see how to change this for just one Footnote. – doncherry Feb 6 '14 at 18:07
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    @Speravir exactly, I need only one footnote to have a symbol. I have note 1-9 numbered, one "asterisked" note and then note 10 and so on – pierpaolo Feb 6 '14 at 18:33
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    @pierpaolo Could you edit your question to describe this situation, with the example you just gave and optimally even with a minimal working example (MWE) with a few footnotes, each specifying what kind it should be? – doncherry Feb 6 '14 at 18:38
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    Are you using hyperref or any packages that modifies the display/formatting of footnotes? – Werner Feb 6 '14 at 18:46
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If you're not using anything fancy in your document (like hyperref, say), you can redefine \@xfootnote:

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
%\setlength{\textheight}{.3\textheight} Just for this example
\makeatletter
\def\@xfootnote[#1]{%
  \protected@xdef\@thefnmark{#1}%
  \@footnotemark\@footnotetext}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
This is a\footnote{Regular footnote} piece of text.
This is a\footnote[*]{Different footnote} piece of text.
This is a\footnote{Regular footnote} piece of text.
This is a\footnote{Regular footnote} piece of text.
This is a\footnote[$\dagger$]{Different footnote} piece of text.
This is a\footnote{Regular footnote} piece of text.
This is a\footnote[$\star$]{Different footnote} piece of text.
\end{document}
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  • Wouldn’t it be semantically nicer to use \textdagger and something like \textasteriskcentered or one of bbding’s or pifont’s stars instead of the math mode versions? – doncherry Feb 6 '14 at 19:00
  • @doncherry: I followed the basic definition of \@fnsymbol in latex.ltx. – Werner Feb 6 '14 at 19:02
  • @Werner It seems to be working fine with hyperref on my end (with hyperfootnotes=true). Is there a particular reason to expect clashes? – triple_sec Feb 12 '20 at 7:28
  • @triple_sec: I know that hyperref changes/taps into a large number of document elements, so was concerned that it would influence that if redefining \@xfootnote. If it works, then go ahead; I probably didn't test it extensively. – Werner Feb 12 '20 at 17:04
  • @Werner I see—I do know what you’re talking about, hyperref can easily wreak havoc. I thought you had identified a specific clash, though. I didn’t check thoroughly, either, but, for what it’s worth, I identified no error message in the console and the output looked very nice. The custom symbols even had clickable hyperlinks attached to them! This is an elegant solution, thank you very much! – triple_sec Feb 13 '20 at 1:22

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