Custom footnote adding extra space before first section

Question

I've been given a template which creates a custom footnote without numbering. The footnote gets correctly set, but it also results in a whitespace between sections.

Here is my code:

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper,twocolumn,twoside]{article}

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

\begin{document}

\section{aaaaa}
bbbb
\customfootnote{My first footnote}
\customfootnote{My second footnote}

\section{My First Section}
Lorem...

\end{document}

I also tried adding it as the first element after \begin{document} but that just results in the whitespace being added before the first section.

What I want to achieve is something similar to what is shown in the following image. This is what my code does, but it also adds the extra space at the top of the page.

I'm using footnote since this is what the template already had, and just found out that the whitspace gets added because of it.

Hope someone knows how to solve it. Thanks.

Answer 1

the problem is that even if there is an empty footnote mark, it's still inserted in the line where it's called.

this should do what you want:

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper,twocolumn,twoside]{article}

\makeatletter
\newcommand\customfootnote[1]{
  \begingroup
    \let\@makefnmark\relax  \let\@thefnmark\relax
    \@footnotetext{#1}
  \endgroup
}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\section{aaaaa}
bbbb
\customfootnote{My first footnote}
\customfootnote{My second footnote}

\section{My First Section}
Lorem...

\end{document}

this is the method used to set "administrative footnotes" on the first page with amsart.