Using \author and \thanks for authors with common affiliations

Question

What is the correct way to use \author and \thanks when I want to have multiple authors having common affiliations? For instance, using

\author{ABC\thanks{XYZ} \and DEF\thanks{UVW} \and GHI\thanks{XYZ}}

produces the following output

at the top of the page and the following output at the bottom of the page

I would like to get rid of XYZ repeating twice at the bottom of the page since authors ABC and GHI have same affiliation.

Answer 1

There may be more general ways of dealing with this, but I'm not sure how much investment should be put in with greater reward than a quick manual intervention.

Since \thanks is just a footnote with a differently formatted number, you can use \footnotemark[<num>] to fix it to affiliation <num>. So, using your example, GHI belongs to \footnotemark[1], which is the same as the affiliation of ABC:

\documentclass{article}
\title{My title}
\author{ABC\thanks{XYZ} \and DEF\thanks{UVW} \and GHI\footnotemark[1]}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}​

There's no need to provide an accompanying \footnotetext, since this is already provided by \thanks{XYZ} for ABC.

This minimal usage might not be optimal for accurate interaction with hyperref. However, this might not be needed.