Is a three-column footnote layout possible?

Question

I'm contemplating the idea of a document layout where citations are author-year-style, but given as footnotes. That is, those notes would be (for the most part) very short, which is a bad match for the one-column footnote layout of the standard classes. One possible remedy is to consolidate footnotes into a single paragraph per page, as done (e.g.) by the para option of the footmisc package:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[para]{footmisc}

\begin{document}

\null\vfill% just for the example

Some text.\footnote{Author 2001} Some more text.\footnote{Buthor 2002}
    And some more.\footnote{Cuthor 2003} Does this text ever end?\footnote{Duthor 2004}
    Yes.\footnote{Euthor 2005}

\end{document}

Another option is to typeset footnotes in two columns (with the running text still one-column). This can be achieved with the dblfnote package:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{dblfnote}
\DFNalwaysdouble% no attempt to fit footnotes into a single column

\begin{document}

\null\vfill% just for the example

Some text.\footnote{Author 2001} Some more text.\footnote{Buthor 2002}
    And some more.\footnote{Cuthor 2003} Does this text ever end?\footnote{Duthor 2004}
    Yes.\footnote{Euthor 2005}

\end{document}

What I'm looking for is a layout similar to that of dblfnote, but with footnotes typeset in three columns. Can this be done with reasonable effort? (I'm hoping for a clever hack of either dblfnote's macros or of the typesetting routines of the multicol package.)

Notes: multicol-like column balancing is not required, and I'm indifferent as to whether column breaks within footnotes should be permitted or not (dblfnote offers both options).

Answer 1

The memoir class provides three-column footnotes. In all it provides four kinds of footnote layouts: normal, two-column, three-column, and run together in a single paragraph.

\documentclass{memoir}

\threecolumnfootnotes

\begin{document}

\null\vfill% just for the example

Some text.\footnote{Author 2001} Some more text.\footnote{Buthor 2002}
    And some more.\footnote{Cuthor 2003} Does this text ever end?\footnote{Duthor 2004}
    Yes.\footnote{Euthor 2005}

\end{document}

Answer 2

Warning: ledmac package is deprecated, see Update section below for correction.

As pointed out by Peter Wilson, memoir's code for three-column footnotes is based on that of the ledmac package. That is, one can enable such a layout also for other classes than memoir with the following caveats:

• Contrary to the standard classes, footnotes (here: the ones in the first column) won't be indented;

• The ledmac footnotes don't feature an optional argument to change the number of individual notes.

Also note that both the memoir class and the ledmac package permit column breaks within individual footnotes.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{ledmac} % see Update section below
\footthreecolX{A}

\let\footnote\footnoteA

\begin{document}

\null\vfill% just for the example

Some text.\footnote{Author 2001} Some more text.\footnote{Buthor 2002}
    And some more.\footnote{Cuthor 2003} Does this text ever end?\footnote{Duthor 2004}
    Yes.\footnote{Euthor 2005}

\end{document}

---

Update

As @LaRiFaRi mentioned, the ledmac package is deprecated and we can use reledmac package instead. To do so, we could exchange the following two lines

\usepackage{ledmac}
\footthreecolX{A}

by these ones

\usepackage{reledmac}
\arrangementX[A]{threecol}

Answer 3

With bidi package (well, sorry if you do not need bidirectional typesetting but it provides extensive tools for footnotes), you can typeset footnotes in 1 to 10 columns. In addition you can typeset paragraph footnotes too. Here is an example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[extrafootnotefeatures]{bidi}
\threecolumnfootnotes

\begin{document}

\null\vfill% just for the example

Some text.\footnote{Author 2001} Some more text.\footnote{Buthor 2002}
    And some more.\footnote{Cuthor 2003} Does this text ever end?\footnote{Duthor 2004}
    Yes.\footnote{Euthor 2005}

\end{document}

In addition you can also control the direction of the column of footnotes. For details see the documentation of bidi package.