\documentclass[a4paper]{article} \usepackage[dvips,a4paper]{geometry} \providecommand\cs[1]{\texttt{\char`\\#1}} \begin{document} \title{The \texttt{fixfoot} package\thanks{This is version 0.3a, of 2007-12-12}} \author{Robin Fairbairns} \maketitle \section{What is it for?} When editing an edition of my father's letters, after his death, I found I was making the same comment, in footnotes, rather a lot. (For example, he had a way of mis-spelling, or jumbling words for comic effect; to point out that these \emph{weren't} transcription errors, I marked them all with a footnoted ``\emph{Sic}''.) Since these footnotes made tedious reading at the best of times, and since sometimes those ``sic'' footnotes appeared several times on one page, I conceived the idea of this package: it ensures that a particular (pre-declared) footnote will only appear once on any page. \section{Using the thing} The package defines only one command, \cs{DeclareFixedFootnote}; this declares a footnote to be repeated. Apart from an optional \texttt{*}, it takes two arguments: the command you'll use to call up the footnote, and the text of each footnote generated. If the optional \texttt{*} is present, the command you've created will end with \cs{xspace}, so as to save you from the onerous business of escaping the space after the footnote invocation. A couple of examples: \begin{quote} \begin{verbatim} \DeclareFixedFootnote*{\sic}{\emph{sic}} \DeclareFixedFootnote{\prooflater}{This theorem will be proved later} \end{verbatim} \end{quote} \section{How does it do it?} The package works by exchanging information with itself, through the medium of the \texttt{.aux} file (like labels, and per-page footnotes in the \textsf{footmisc} package). I never got around to making it tell you to re-run the document when you need to (as labels and those per-page footnotes do). \end{document}