This is the bigfoot bundle for critical edition typesetting and other concerns, written by David Kastrup (mailto:dak@gnu.org). The complete package in development can be accessed using the CVS instructions at , and CTAN:/macros/latex/contrib/bigfoot provides released versions. The whole bundle is released under the GPL version 2 (or later), see the file COPYING for details. Part of the work has been sponsored or commissioned by various parties (including TUG), but further functionality and development depends on your support, financially or by participation. The author has a Paypal account which you might consider contributing to. All of the files (except perpage.sty, for historical reasons) need eTeX 2 as the LaTeX engine. All modern distributions provide this by default. A Makefile is provided for generating most files. In case the platform does not support Make, the distribution tarball includes the file bigfoot.ins pregenerated from bigfoot.dtx. File descriptions for available files: bigfoot.ins: This is a generated file and not in the Git repository (but on CTAN). Generating it can be done by running `tex docstrip' and answering the prompts \infileext=dtx \outfileext=ins \Options=installer \filelist=bigfoot If you instead use \Options=installer,make you will get a version of `bigfoot.ins' which will not ask before overwriting files, but will only place them in the current directory even if your docstrip configuration contains target directory declarations. Running TeX on bigfoot.ins will generate a number of style files (with the extension .sty) and a number of documentation driver files (with the extension .drv). Here come the source files themselves: suffix.dtx: This is the doc source for `suffix.sty', a package that makes it very easy to define command variants like \macro* or \macro\!. It is included in the critical bundle since typical document classes for real critical editions documents will tend to want weird signs under handy abbreviations, like \< and \<<, or \=>, or things like \footnote' macros, or \footnote<...\footnote> with different formatting/numbering and so on. perpage.dtx: This is the doc source for `perpage.sty'. Used for keeping counters sorted in order of page appearance and making numbering per page possible. bigfoot.dtx: This is the doc source for `bigfoot.sty'. Used for solving every problem around footnotes and then some. Deals with nested footnotes in several apparatus, uses a backtracking algorithm for finding the optimal break across several footnotes, automatically breaks in-paragraph style footnotes across pages, uses fuzzy logic for deciding about when to prefer in-paragraph layout to one-footnote-per-paragraph layout on a per-note and per-block basis, deals with colors in footnotes even when broken across pages, adapts the document class's footnote style to in-paragraph footnotes as good as it can, allows customization of styles differing across footnote blocks, allows verbatim text in footnotes and so on.