LyX ⇒ how to make nested footnotes in Lyx?

[ExecutorElassus]

I've read the following reports regarding bigfoot and footnotes:

This one, and this one, and also this one.

They all provide slightly different ways of achieving what I want, which is footnotes within footnotes (for the sake of annotation). However, I've read that Lyx does not allow this, and my attempts to modify a lyx document consistently result in an error about missing a number at the point of the second footnote insertion.

I'm using the bigfoot package, also KOMAScript (which invokes hyperref, making it difficult to insert the hyperfootnotes=false command, as one of those threads suggests). The relevant section of my present preamble reads thus:

Code: Select all

\usepackage[ruled]{bigfoot}
\DeclareNewFootnote{default}
\DeclareNewFootnote{B}[symbol*]
\MakeSortedPerPage{footnoteB}
\makeatletter
\let\@makefntext@orig\@makefntext
\FootnoteSpecific{B}\def\@makefntext{\@makefntext@orig\tiny}
\makeatother

which compiles fine unless I insert a {\footnoteB} into the text.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there some other way to achieve this in Lyx?

Thanks,

EE

EDIT: Added "solved" to the subject, which is a habit I picked up from another forum. It's helpful!

[cgnieder]

First of all I am not a LyX user usually.

This preamble addition works for me:

Code: Select all

\usepackage{bigfoot}
\DeclareNewFootnote{default}
\DeclareNewFootnote{B}[fnsymbol]
\MakePerPage{footnoteB}

Note the line

Code: Select all

\DeclareNewFootnote{B}[fnsymbol]

which is different from yours. The optional argument (the one in square brackets) determines how the corresponding footnote counter is formatted. Basically it means that a command \fnsymbol{footnoteB} is called. In your preamble the line reads

Code: Select all

\DeclareNewFootnote{B}[symbol*]

which would call a command \symbol*{footnoteB} which won't work in standard LaTeX for formatting a counter and thus must produce an error.

Please also note the line

Code: Select all

\MakePerPage{footnoteB}

The \fnsymbol only has nine symbols! This means if the number of footnotes exceeds nine an error will be thrown. The above line tries to prevent this by starting from the first symbol on a new page.

Regards

[ExecutorElassus]

ZOMG that fixed it. Thank you so much for clarifying this. As you can see, there are a bunch of different threads about it, and they're all somewhat old. It doesn't help that the documentation for bigfoot is … sparse, to put it mildly, and the documentation for manyfoot on which it relies was written by a non-native speaker.

As for the finite counter, I do not expect to have more than nine of these per page (they are, after all, annotations to footnotes, and should thus be comparitively rare). If it comes down to it, I imagine I could make another footnote/counter set for the next level down.

Anyway, now it compiles fine, so I'm going to spend some time geeking out with the fine-tuning.

Thanks again,

EE
PS- while I set it to [SOLVED], I still have a couple questions. First, the size specification doesn't seem to accept the more-varied size descriptions available to KOMAScript (such as "smaller" and "smallest"), instead going from "small" to "tiny." Is there a way around this? Also, If I did, in fact, want to add a third apparatus, how much of the code in the preamble would I need to copy and duplicate? Thanks again.

[cgnieder]

As for the finite counter, I do not expect to have more than nine of these per page (they are, after all, annotations to footnotes, and should thus be comparitively rare).

That's what I thought. But without the \MakePerPage call the error would be thrown if you had more than nine document wide so I thinks it's better to include it.

BTW: the \MakePerPage macro is provided by the perpage package which is loaded by bigfoot.

Regards