10.3.1 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 footnote⁴; 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, this 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. (Another style, perfectly acceptable, is to put the footnote after punctuation belonging to the sentence, as in ‘;@footnote{...’.)

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 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.

Footnotes cannot be nested, and cannot appear in section headings of any kind or other “unusual” places.

A final tip: footnotes in the argument of an @item command for an @table must be entirely on the same line as the @item (as usual). See Two-column Tables.