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The bigfoot handles the breaking of footnotes across pages quite well, but personally I don't like it if I have to turn the page to read a complete footnote.

Therefore my question: Is it possible to make bigfoot only break footnotes if the its second part will be on the opposite side of a double-page spread?

Another footnote-related question: There doesn't seem to be widow control when it comes to footnotes. I occasionally have broken footnotes where there are only a few words on the new side. This looks, of course, quite ugly – can this be avoided?

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  • I don't have time to test it right now but, regarding your first question, how about trying to use the chngpage package (unless you are using memoir, which implements it) to test whether the page is odd or even, and then something like \interfootnotelinepenalty=10000 (not sure how it interacts with bigfoot).
    – ienissei
    Commented Jan 5, 2012 at 22:16

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
8

I think bigfoot has (undocumented) \footnotewidowpenalty and \footnoteclubpenalty values.

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  • 2
    Would you care to add some more detail in the form of a minimal working example (MWE) that illustrates its usage (since these counters are undocumented)?
    – Werner ♦
    Commented Jan 5, 2012 at 20:15
  • setting both \footnotewidowpenalty and \footnoteclubpenalty to 10000 does indeed prevent single lines in broken footnotes. So this does take care of the second part of my question. Thanks a lot.
    – Simifilm
    Commented Jan 5, 2012 at 21:30
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Taking ienissei's hint I tried to do this with komascripts \ifthispageodd command and encountered something interesting: As my MWE shows this doesn't produce stable results – each time I typeset the MWE the footnotes are broken differently:

\documentclass[twoside]{scrartcl}

\usepackage{bigfoot}
\interfootnotelinepenalty=8000
\newcommand*{\smartfootnote}[1]{\ifthispageodd{\interfootnotelinepenalty=10000}{\interfootnotelinepenalty=8000}\footnote{#1}\interfootnotelinepenalty=9000}

\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}

\blindtext

\blindtext

\blindtext

\blindtext\smartfootnote{\blindtext}

\blindtext\smartfootnote{\blindtext}

\blindtext

\blindtext\smartfootnote{\blindtext\blindtext} \blindtext

\blindtext\blindtext\blindtext\smartfootnote{\blindtext} \blindtext
\end{document}

After the first run footnote 3 is broken across pages 2 and 3 as it should be, while footnote 4 is unbroken on page 4. After the second run, footnote 4 is broken across pages 3 and 4 which is wrong, after the third run, we're again correct. And so on and so on …

While I understand why this is happening, this is definitely not the last word on this.

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  • I had tried to implement something similar with memoir and never reached a satisfactory result either. Hopefully someone will find.
    – ienissei
    Commented Jan 15, 2012 at 9:26

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