Footnote without a marker

Question

I would like to have a footnote about the funding source of my work in the first page without marker.

I tried below approaches:

1. \footnotetext{text goes here} This creates a footnote but with '0' as marker. However, the marker reference does not appear within the normal text where I placed this command.

2. Used \def\blfootnote{\xdef\@thefnmark{}\@footnotetext} definition provided at http://help-csli.stanford.edu/tex/latex-footnotes.shtml#unnumber. I placed this definition in the main tex file just after package declaration. But, this gives the below error.

      ! Use of \@ doesn't match its definition.
      \blfootnote ->\xdef \@thefnmark{}\@f
                                          ootnotetext
   

Answer 1

As Stephen mentioned in his answer, if you're using your definition in your .tex file, you need to enclose it inside \makeatletter, \makeatother. Another option not involving the use of the special character @ (thus not requiring \makeatletter, \makeatother) would be to locally redefine \thefootnote (taking care of correcting the footnote counter):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\newcommand\blfootnote[1]{%
  \begingroup
  \renewcommand\thefootnote{}\footnote{#1}%
  \addtocounter{footnote}{-1}%
  \endgroup
}

\begin{document}

Some text\blfootnote{A footnote without marker} and some more text\footnote{A standard footnote}

\end{document}

Answer 2

In some cases, you might want to suppress the number on a footnote. I looked around the web, and a few suggestions were out there, but the simplest one I could find was the following:

\let\thefootnote\relax\footnotetext{Put your text here}

Answer 3

@ is a special character in (La)TeX. Enclose your code with \makeatletter, \makeatother:

\makeatletter
\def\blfootnote{\gdef\@thefnmark{}\@footnotetext}
\makeatother

---

Edit (from my former comments):

Internal commands with @ can be used without \makeatletter and \makeatother in the class file (as you found out) as well as in style files, too. Only in the .tex file the "envelope" is needed. That said, I would prefer Gonzalo Medina's answer over my own (or your placement of the redefinition in the class file) because it only locally redefines footnote (respectively give a new command for unnumbered footnotes).

When you are using the hyperref package, you would probably want to add \addtocounter{Hfootnote}{-1}% to the code of GM, otherwise it will work but error messages about (hyper)footnotes will become tricky, because e.g. Hfootnote 42 then is footnote 41 - use \addtocounter{footnote}{-1} without \addtocounter{Hfootnote}{-1} for several cases, and the difference between footnote and Hfootnote makes debugging harder than necessary.

Edit (again):

As suggested by egreg, I changed \xdef (=\global\edef) to \gdef (=\global\def), because there is no need to *e*xpand the *def*inition's content here (as it is just empty).

Answer 4

I know this is an old question, but the answers from both Gonzalo Medina and Stephen may interact poorly with hyperref. I did not test the titlefoot package but, from my limited understanding of the LaTeX code, it seems it may not be immune either.

Apparently, however, we are "safe" by using @xfootnotenext, as hyperref's implementation of it delegates to the default LaTeX footnote code. And it is simple to do so, just call \footnotetext with an optional parameter. To do that, switch footnote markers temporarily to symbols and select 0 as the symbol. Nothing gets printed (no symbol for 0), nothing gets added to the text (we are just using footnotetext), and hyperref does not try to add anchors or links.

\newcommand\extrafootertext[1]{%
    \bgroup
    \renewcommand\thefootnote{\fnsymbol{footnote}}%
    \renewcommand\thempfootnote{\fnsymbol{mpfootnote}}%
    \footnotetext[0]{#1}%
    \egroup
}

Answer 5

There’s also an old package, titlefoot, which has no documentation except a few comments in the .sty file. It provides a command, \unmarkedfntext{...}, which has never caused problems in my documents. A little example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{blindtext,titlefoot}
\title{My Brilliant Article}
\author{Me}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\begin{document}
\maketitle\unmarkedfntext{Originally published by Oxford.}

\blindtext\footnote{It seems to play well with hyperref.}
\end{document}

Answer 6

You could use the \footnotemark[0] and \footnotetext[0]{Footnote text} pair. The [0] will suppress the label.

Answer 7

Tried previous answers several times but did not work. I am working on the AIAA template and the solution was this simple:

\footnote[]{Footnote without number.}

Answer 8

It's an old question, but just so there is an answer in plain tex, in plain tex you can just do \footnote{}{Footnote without a marker}.

Answer 9

For those looking to remove the in-line mark, yet keep the number in the footnote, you can define a custom \marklessfootnote command.

\newcommand\marklessfootnote[1]{
    \addtocounter{footnote}{1} %no call is made to \footnotemark.
    \footnotetext{#1}
}

This may be useful for those wanting to define a footnote to refer to in a table (see Q1, Q2), where there are common problems. The markless footnote can then be referred to in a table using a regular \ref command, or the cleveref package command \cref with ease, also compatible with hyperref package.

Ref:

%... inside my doc
\marklessfootnote{My footnote \label{ftn:01}}
%... inside my tabular...
\textsuperscript{\tiny\ref{ftn:01}} % With commands to superscript the mark.

Cleveref:

Note to make Cref link the same style as the regular footnote, you can redefine the format as follows:

\crefformat{footnote}{#2\textsuperscript{\footnotemark[#1]}#3} %optional to superscript mark.
%... %inside my doc
\marklessfootnote{My footnote \label{ftn:01}}
%... %inside my tabular...
\cref{ftn:01}

Answer 10

Based on Shukla's answer, one can do

{\def\thefootnote{}\footnotetext{Put your text here}}

so that the definition of \thefootnote will reset outside the local group.

Anothery hacky way is

\footnotetext[0\def\thefoornote{}]{Your footnote here}

This will also nullify the printing command. This is only temporary (because things in [] are put in a local group.)