12.3.1 Footnote Commands

In Texinfo, footnotes are created with the @footnote command. This command is followed immediately by a left brace, then by the text of the footnote, and then by a terminating right brace. Footnotes may be of any length (they will be broken across pages if necessary), but are usually short. The template is:

ordinary text@footnote{text of footnote}

As shown here, the @footnote command should come right after the text being footnoted, with no intervening space; otherwise, the footnote marker might end up starting a line.

For example, this clause is followed by a sample footnote(5); in the Texinfo source, it looks like this:

…a sample footnote@footnote{Here is the sample
footnote.}; in the Texinfo source…

As you can see, the source includes two punctuation marks next to each other; in this case, ‘.};’ is the sequence. This is normal (the first ends the footnote and the second belongs to the sentence being footnoted), so don’t worry that it looks odd.

In a printed manual or book, the reference mark for a footnote is a small, superscripted number; the text of the footnote appears at the bottom of the page, below a horizontal line.

In Info, the reference mark for a footnote is a pair of parentheses with the footnote number between them, like this: ‘(1)’. The reference mark is followed by a cross reference link to the footnote text if footnotes are put in separate nodes (see section Footnote Styles).

In the HTML output, footnote references are generally marked with a small, superscripted number which is rendered as a hypertext link to the footnote text.

By the way, footnotes in the argument of an @item command for an @table must be on the same line as the @item (as usual). See section Making a Two-column Table.

This document was generated on October 2, 2013 using texi2html 5.0.