How to make a footnote appear on the left column?

Question

It is tricky to provide a MWE, but I have a two-columned document in which a footnote appears on the right column, but the left column has still a space for a footnote in the sense that there is empty space in the left column. I would like to move the footnote to the left column, but I am not sure how to force a footnote to appear in a certain column. The closest I could find is https://ctan.org/pkg/ftnright but I don't think it is quite right.

Answer 1

Assuming you have:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}

\usepackage{mwe}

\begin{document}
\Blindtext[2]
\blindtext\footnote{Test footnote A}
\blindtext\footnote{Test footnote B}
\blindtext\footnote{Test footnote C}
And some more text.\footnote{Test footnote D}
\end{document}

and know you want to move two of the footnotes below the left column. I do not know an automatic solution for this. AFAIK you would need to rewrite the output routine of LaTeX and this would be hard to do. Moving the footnotes from the left column to the right column as ftnright does, is more or less delaying the output. But in your case, you want to move only some of them to the already build column.

On the other hand, doing it manually is possible, because it is possible to split footnotes into the mark and the text and the text:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}

\usepackage{mwe}

\begin{document}
\Blindtext[2]\footnotetext[\numexpr \value{footnote}+1\relax]{Test footnote A}%
\footnotetext[\numexpr \value{footnote}+2\relax]{Test footnote B}
\blindtext\footnotemark
\blindtext\footnotemark
\blindtext\footnote{Test footnote C}
And some more text.\footnote{Test footnote D}
\end{document}

So if you really, want to have, you can get it, but with extra effort for the author and risk of doing it multiple times, when the text changes. And if the footnote have several lines or the number of footnote lines not an even number, the balancing would also fail. Because of this, I would indeed suggest to place all footnotes of a page below the right column using ftnright.