Footnotes from floats in LaTeX
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LATEX defines several floating environments, of which figures and tables are the most important. The LATEX engine will by default move these around, even onto different pages, in order to achieve optimal horizontal and vertical page layouts. Human book editors and typesetters do the same thing when preparing books for press.
Because of the way the LATEX engine handles floats, footnotes from within them are problematic. In the normal case, the author inserts a \footnote{} command with the footnote text within the curly braces into the text at the point where the footnote marker should appear:
Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules\footnote{We acknowledge that 'module' is a really bad term.} that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute: authors, instructors, and learners.However, if the author is making a footnote from within a float environment, one inserts a
\footnotemark command into the text in the float at the point where the footnote mark should appear, and then after the end of the float, one tacks on a \footnotetext{} command with the text of the footnote in it:
\begin{figure}The
\begin{center}
\rule[.1in]{5.25in}{.005in}
\includegraphics{blorgy.png}
% Caption text
Figure 1.1: This figure caption has a footnote.\footnotemark
\rule[.1in]{5.25in}{.001in}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\footnotetext{This is the text of the footnote.}
\footnotemark command increments the footnote counter, so if you have more than one \footnotemark before the \footnotetext{} commands, you have to set the footnote counter back so that the first \footnotetext{} doesn't get the count of the last \footnotemark. To eliminate the need for a conditional test, I'd aim for this LATEX output from our stylesheets:
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\rule[.1in]{5.25in}{.005in}
\includegraphics{blorgy.png}
% Caption text
Figure 1.1: This figure caption has a footnote.\footnotemark
In fact, it has two.\footnotemark
\rule[.1in]{5.25in}{.001in}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\addtocounter{footnote}{-2}
\stepcounter{footnote}\footnotetext{This is the text of the first footnote.}
\stepcounter{footnote}\footnotetext{This is the text of the second footnote.}
Now, this a nuisance to code because we have at least three different elements that yield footnotes, and one of them (cnxn) does so only under certain circumnstances. It can be coded, but doing it sensibly may require refactoring the handling of cnxn. The real frustration is that, even if we create the correct LATEX markup, there is no guarantee that these footnotes will show up on the same page as the float. See the footnotes 29 and 30 in the caption for Figure 1.59 on p. 42/48 of [https://trac.rhaptos.org/trac/rhaptos/export/20130/printing_workfiles/col10363/trunk/col10363.pdf this PDF]. The notes themselves appear on the following page. You can find more on this problem in Trac ticket #3568.
Now, we suppress the floating aspect of LATEX floats because in many cases (in examples and exercises, e.g.) we don't want figures floating away from their accompanying text (or from the text they accompany). Nonetheless, that doesn't help with the footnote placement problem--footnotes still move around.
