Poetry in footnote
You could use a verse
environment inside a minipage
environment in order to suppress the unwanted initial blank lines. The following MWE illustrates this method. Since it appears you may have a lot of these cases, you may want to create a new command called, say \vfootnote
, that acts like a normal footnote except that it typesets its contents in a minipage
that's not offset very much -- per your stated preferences -- to the right of the footnote number
\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\newenvironment{fnverse}
{\let\\\@centercr
\list{}{\itemsep 0pt
\itemindent -1.5em%
\listparindent\itemindent
\rightmargin \leftmargin
\advance\leftmargin-1em}% adjust to taste
\item\relax}
{\endlist}
\makeatother
\newcommand{\vfootnote}[1]{%
\footnote{%
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.9\textwidth}
\begin{fnverse}
#1
\end{fnverse}
\end{minipage}}}
\begin{document}
\ldots\ the opening lines of Vergil's Aeneid.\vfootnote{%
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris\\
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit\\
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto\\
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;\\
multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem, \\
inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum,\\
Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae.}
More text \ldots
\end{document}
The resulting footnote looks like this (note that I've kept the page marker in the image to provide a sense of the vertical separation between footnote material and the page number):
An expansion of my earlier comment:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[hang]{footmisc}
\setlength{\footnotemargin}{1em}% probably need at least 1.5em if >100
% footnotes
% default 'hang' values:
% \renewcommand{\hangfootparskip}{0.5\baselineskip}%
% \renewcommand{\hangfootparindent}{0em}
\begin{document}
Text.%
\footnote{\lipsum[1]}
\setcounter{footnote}{9}
Text.%
\footnote{\lipsum[1-2]}
\setcounter{footnote}{99}
Text.%
\footnote{\lipsum[3]}
\end{document}
In article.cls
you can find the definition of \@makefntext
:
\newcommand\@makefntext[1]{%
\parindent 1em%
\noindent
\hb@[email protected]{\hss\@makefnmark}#1}
The following redefinition makes footnotes' lines aligned (basically we use hangindent for this:
\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@makefntext[1]{%
\hangindent=1.8em\hangafter=1\parindent=0em\noindent
\everypar{\hangindent=1.8em\hangafter=1}%
\hb@[email protected]{\hss\@makefnmark}#1}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
In the Frost's
poem\footnote{%
Whose woods these are I think I know.\\
His house is in the village though;}
\end{document}