LaTex sequentially numbered footnotes even if empty content

Question

I'm trying to accomplish this in LaTeX: I have a text divided by something we can call "versicles", like the Bible (it's not the Bible but it will be easier if you think of it as the Bible), each one with its own versicle number. I have hundreds of footnotes, for many but not all of the versicles. I want all the versicles to be numbered sequentially, whether they have footnote or not; and I want all the existing footnotes numbered accordingly, but I don't want a footnote to appear at the bottom of the page if I have no text associated to it, although I do want its number to appear in the right versicle of the page.

That is, if I have the following sentences:

This is the first sentence. This is the second. This is the last.

I want them to appear like this:

This is the first sentence¹. This is the second². This is the last³.

And since (for example) I only have footnotes associated to the first and last sentence, the footnote section of the page should look like this:

---

¹ Note for first sentence.

³ Note for last sentence.

(with no added vertical space between them; just the standard between notes in the same page.)

I've searched the site and the net and also some packages but I'm not able to find anyone who has dealt with this before.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I suggest using \footnotemark and \footnotetext. Something like this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\newcommand{\vs}[1][]{%
  \footnotemark
  \ifblank{#1}
    {}
    {\footnotetext{#1}}}
\begin{document}
\null\vfill
This is the first sentence\vs[Note for the first sentence].
This is the second\vs.
This is the last\vs[Note for the last sentence].
\end{document}