12.3.2 Footnote Styles

Info has two footnote styles, which determine where the text of the footnote is located:

• In the `End' node style, all the footnotes for a single node are placed at the end of that node. The footnotes are separated from the rest of the node by a line of dashes with the word ‘Footnotes’ within it. Each footnote begins with an ‘(n)’ reference mark.

  Here is an example of a single footnote in the end of node style:

  --------- Footnotes --------- (1) Here is a sample footnote.

• In the `Separate' node style, all the footnotes for a single node are placed in an automatically constructed node of their own. In this style, a “footnote reference” follows each ‘(n)’ reference mark in the body of the node. The footnote reference is actually a cross reference which you use to reach the footnote node.

  The name of the node with the footnotes is constructed by appending ‘-Footnotes’ to the name of the node that contains the footnotes. (Consequently, the footnotes' node for the ‘Footnotes’ node is ‘Footnotes-Footnotes’!) The footnotes' node has an `Up' node pointer that leads back to its parent node.

  Here is how the first footnote in this manual looks after being formatted for Info in the separate node style:

  File: texinfo.info Node: Overview-Footnotes, Up: Overview (1) The first syllable of "Texinfo" is pronounced like "speck", not "hex". …

Unless your document has long and important footnotes (as in, say, Gibbon's Decline and Fall …), we recommend the ‘end’ style, as it is simpler for readers to follow.

Use the @footnotestyle command to specify an Info file's footnote style. Write this command at the beginning of a line followed by an argument, either ‘end’ for the end node style or ‘separate’ for the separate node style.

For example,

@footnotestyle end

or

@footnotestyle separate

Write an @footnotestyle command before or shortly after the end-of-header line at the beginning of a Texinfo file. (If you include the @footnotestyle command between the start-of-header and end-of-header lines, the region formatting commands will format footnotes as specified.)

If you do not specify a footnote style, the formatting commands use their default style. Currently, texinfo-format-buffer and texinfo-format-region use the `separate' style and makeinfo uses the `end' style.