Separating different kinds of footnotes with bigfoot

Question

I am using the bigfoot package to create two sets of footnotes, one in para style and the other plain (in that order on the page). I have removed the line separating these footnotes from the body of the text using \renewcommand*\footnoterule{}, but I would like a line to appear between the two types of footnotes to produce an effect similar to the document below, with the alphabetical (paragraph) footnotes beneath the text body and the numerical (plain) ones below a line. What would be the simplest way to do this? (I can provide more information about my current setup if necessary, but I'm new to asking questions and didn't know what to include. Thanks!)

Answer 1

The bigfoot documentation is rather short; however, it states in the last-but-one paragraph:

[F]or the customization possibilities of bigfoot with regards to multiple footnote blocks and rules between them, refer to manyfoot’s documentation.

The manyfoot package includes the \extrafootnoterule macro which controls the rule between different footnote blocks and is empty by default. In your case, copy the original definition of \footnoterule to \extrafootnoterule and only then redefine \footnoterule.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{bigfoot}
\DeclareNewFootnote[para]{default}[alph]
\MakeSortedPerPage{footnote}
\DeclareNewFootnote{L}
\MakeSorted{footnoteL}

\let\extrafootnoterule\footnoterule
\renewcommand{\footnoterule}{}

\begin{document}

\null\vfill% just for the example

Some text.\footnote{A para footnote.}

Some more text.\footnote{Another para footnote.}

And some more.\footnoteL{A plain footnote.}

\end{document}