[texhax] typesetting short footnotes into paragraph

[Thanh Han The]

Dear list,

I am typesetting a book with a lot of short footnotes that have to be
typeset into paragraph as described in TeXBook, pages 398--400. I am
using the macro in TeXBook, but sometimes the page-breaking is far from
optimal. The reason is that the estimated height of footnotes is sometime
very different from the real height. This can be best described by an
example:

\hsize=100pt, \footBaselineSkip=10pt --> \fudgefactor=.1

Let's have on a page 11 footnotes, each 10pt long. The estimated height is
11pt, while the real height is 20pt (2 lines). The page breaking algorithm
might find a break where 11pt footnote fit perfectly, but 20pt is then too
much. In fact this happens quite often, leading to many overfull boxes
during output routine.

The real problem seem how to make the effective height (ie total height of
current footnotes) to be *always the same* as the final height (ie
totalFootLines*\footBaselineSkip). This is needed to avoid page breaking
from happening too late, as discussed above.

My question is, does anyone know of a trick to deal with the above issue?

I did some searching, and the most relevant thing I found was edmac.doc
from the edmac package. The macros in edmac.doc has some improvements over
the macro in TeXBook, but it doesn't seem to deal witht the above problem.

Thanks,
Thanh