Footnotes causing pagebreaks in philosophersimprint.cls

Question

I am trying to typeset an article using the philosophersimprint class, but footnotes are having a weird interaction with pagebreaks. Here is a minimal example demonstrating my problem:

\documentclass{philosophersimprint}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
  \lipsum[1]
  \section{First Section}
  A sentence fragment.\footnote{A footnote}
  \subsection{A subsection}
  \lipsum[3-4]
\end{document}

The first column lasts up until the footnote, and then the column breaks and starts subsection 1.1 at the top of the next column.

Using the \samepage environment closes up the gap, but later on in the document it makes text run off the bottom of the page in many places. I'm thinking that I'll have to make my own changes to how philosophersimprint.cls handles either footnotes or {sub,}sections, but I'm not sure which to look at.

Answer 1

The problem comes from the assignement

\setlength{\skip\footins}{13.5pt plus 1fill}

made in philosophersimprint.cls. A possible solution is to override this value, doing something like

\documentclass{philosophersimprint}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\makeatletter
\setlength{\skip\footins}{\bigskipamount}
\makeatother

\begin{document}
  \lipsum[1]
  \section{First Section}
  A sentence fragment.\footnote{A footnote}
  \subsection{A subsection}
  \lipsum[3-4]
\end{document}

I chose the value \bigskipamount since it's the value used in the LaTeX kernel, but the author/maintainer of the class can decide what should be the best value to be used here.