I find the spacing of footnote marks after punctuation marks quite unsatisfactory, especially with sans serif fonts and compared to the spacing after letters. Example follows:
I came up with a little macro myself that tries to amend this manually.
\documentclass{article}
% URW Classico is a font that makes the issue apparent
\renewcommand{\sfdefault}{uop}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
% define punctuation-aware footnote macro
\newlength{\punctuationfootlength}
\newcommand{\punctuationfootnote}[2]{#2\settowidth{\punctuationfootlength}%
{#2}\hspace{-\punctuationfootlength}\footnote{#1}}
% define a very small type area and don't care about margins
\setlength{\textwidth}{150pt}
\setlength{\textheight}{5\baselineskip}
\begin{document}
\noindent The three little pigs built their houses
out of straw\punctuationfootnote{not to be confused with hay},
sticks\footnote{or lumber according to some sources} and
bricks\punctuationfootnote{probably fired clay bricks}.
\end{document}
This will look like this:
I have to say, I didn't like this either. So I fiddled around a bit and set back the footnote marks by a half
and a third of the width of the punctuation mark.
Personally, I like the look of the last (-.3\punctuationfootlength
) the best. But I'm a bit concerned that nobody ever seemed to have shared my opinion on this and if anything put a hair space between a letter and a footnote mark but never decreased the kerning. So if any typography guru here could put me straight on this matter that would be great. I'm also happy about anyone's second or third opinion on this.
Edit: Originally I also asked for a better way to TeX this here. As this is a separate question however, I moved it here.
Edit 3: That question led to a new package, fnpct
, which should be used to automatically adapt footnote kerning in your LaTeX document.
Edit 2: Jon's comment caused me to succumb to the temptation I had all along of trying an additional intermediate between solutions 2 and 3. It seems like a ridiculously small change but here is -.4\punctuationfootlength
:
Can't decide though. After a bit of pondering, I think I like the 3 a bit closer than the 1 which doesn't make things easier I guess.
\punctuationfootnote
to have two arguments, but then the macro is called with only one argument, viz., the content of the footnote. Am I missing something? Or is the second argument the punctuation mark? If so, it might be cleaner if you surrounded the punctuation mark with curly braces to make this setup explicit. By the way, the font "URW Classico" would appear to be a clone of Hermann Zapf's famous "Optima" font.\footnote
to\punctuationfootnote
and vice-versa. It gets even worse if you end up publishing in a European journal, where the expectation is that the footnotemark goes inside the punctuation mark! Also, while the first option looks ridiculous, I'm not convinced that the third is an (amazing) improvement over the default setup: are the complications worth the changes in appearance?\punctuationfootnote
it is. Do I take it that you prefer the second option? Actually, collecting different aesthetic opinions on this was meant to be part of the question. Lastly, I don't understand what you mean by "footnotemark goes inside the punctuation mark". Is it "texttext\footnote{foo}."? This would further argue for omitting the {} of the second argument I guess but that's just a matter of taste anyway.biblatex
's punctuation tracker: perhaps it can be turned to your needs.