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
<URL:http://sarovar.org/projects/bigfoot>, and
CTAN:/macros/latex/contrib/bigfoot provides released versions.

The whole bundle is released under the GPL version 2 (or later).  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.  Newer distributions already are
eTeX-based; with older distributions you might need to use the
`elatex' command.

File descriptions for available files:

bigfoot.ins: This is a generated file and not in the CVS archive (but
   on CTAN).  If you need to generate it, you can do so by running
   `tex docstrip' and answering the prompts

     \infileext=dtx
     \outfileext=ins
     \Options=installer
     \filelist=bigfoot

   Running TeX on bigfoot.ins will generate further files.

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.