LaTeX: Footnotes

A footnote is a note placed at the bottom of the page that references text in the page above it. Footnotes can be added to a LaTeX document using the TeX \footnote macro.

For example, the above footnotes can be obtained by:

Footnotes\footnote{A note at the page bottom.} are frowned upon in the \LaTeX community\footnote{No idea why!}.

I personally do not like this style. I find it distracting to put the footnote text in the middle of the referencing text. An alternative is to provide a footnote mark in the referencing text and place the footnote text later. This can be done using the LaTeX \footnotemark and \footnotetext commands.

For example, to obtain the footnotes as shown above:

Footnotes\footnotemark[1] are frowned upon in the \LaTeX community\footnotemark[2].

\footnotetext[1]{A note at the page bottom.}
\footnotetext[2]{No idea why!}

If you are using only a single footnote, then the footnote number argument can be skipped:

Footnotes\footnotemark are frowned upon in the \LaTeX community.

\footnotetext{A note at the page bottom.}

Reference: Section 4.5 Footnotes from the book Digital Typography Using LaTeX.