Is a three-column footnote layout possible?
The memoir
class provides three-column footnotes. In all it provides four kinds of footnote layouts: normal, two-column, three-column, and run together in a single paragraph.
\documentclass{memoir}
\threecolumnfootnotes
\begin{document}
\null\vfill% just for the example
Some text.\footnote{Author 2001} Some more text.\footnote{Buthor 2002}
And some more.\footnote{Cuthor 2003} Does this text ever end?\footnote{Duthor 2004}
Yes.\footnote{Euthor 2005}
\end{document}
Warning: ledmac
package is deprecated, see Update section below for correction.
As pointed out by Peter Wilson, memoir
's code for three-column footnotes is based on that of the ledmac
package. That is, one can enable such a layout also for other classes than memoir
with the following caveats:
Contrary to the standard classes, footnotes (here: the ones in the first column) won't be indented;
The
ledmac
footnotes don't feature an optional argument to change the number of individual notes.
Also note that both the memoir
class and the ledmac
package permit column breaks within individual footnotes.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{ledmac} % see Update section below
\footthreecolX{A}
\let\footnote\footnoteA
\begin{document}
\null\vfill% just for the example
Some text.\footnote{Author 2001} Some more text.\footnote{Buthor 2002}
And some more.\footnote{Cuthor 2003} Does this text ever end?\footnote{Duthor 2004}
Yes.\footnote{Euthor 2005}
\end{document}
Update
As @LaRiFaRi mentioned, the ledmac
package is deprecated and we can use reledmac
package instead. To do so, we could exchange the following two lines
\usepackage{ledmac}
\footthreecolX{A}
by these ones
\usepackage{reledmac}
\arrangementX[A]{threecol}
With bidi
package (well, sorry if you do not need bidirectional typesetting but it provides extensive tools for footnotes), you can typeset footnotes in 1 to 10 columns. In addition you can typeset paragraph footnotes too. Here is an example:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[extrafootnotefeatures]{bidi}
\threecolumnfootnotes
\begin{document}
\null\vfill% just for the example
Some text.\footnote{Author 2001} Some more text.\footnote{Buthor 2002}
And some more.\footnote{Cuthor 2003} Does this text ever end?\footnote{Duthor 2004}
Yes.\footnote{Euthor 2005}
\end{document}
In addition you can also control the direction of the column of footnotes. For details see the documentation of bidi
package.