[texhax] bigfoot: nested footnotes within \title

[Uwe Lueck]

"jason heimbaugh" <jason at heimbaugh.com> wrote 26.01.2011 06:48:01:
> So bigfoot works perfectly, within the body of a document. 
> For an odd reason I'd like to have a footnote on the book title 
> (which works), then a nested footnote within that (which doesn't):
>
> \title{Exciting Title\footnote{This needs explained.\footnoteB{Some people need help.}}}
> \maketitle
>
> But that fails with:
>
> ! Argument of \MFL at xmkmark has an extra }.
>
>				\par
> l.13 \maketitle
>
> ====
>
> Is this something that will never work, or something that might work under different use/modded bigfoot?

According my own recent investigation of bigfoot 
(perhaps only its author can tell definitly):

bigfoot allows making footnotes to footnotes, but with restrictions. 
It allows, more precisely, introducing a number of footnote "levels" 
(so much like manyfoot), and then you can refer to a footnote of 
*one* level in a footnote of *another* level.

So when you expect that you can nest \footnote commands with bigfoot, 
this is (I think) just a misunderstanding of bigfoot's functionality.

However, bigfoot's error message with wrong nesting usually is a 
different one. \footnote commands in \title may be just a different matter. 
Although I have tried to answer a similar posting before, I cannot tell 
immediately what happens with \footnote in \title *without* bigfoot. 
The author, David Kastrup, may just have thought that users shouldn't 
use \footnote in \title.

On the other hand, in general you can nest normal footnotes 
*without* bigfoot, just by \footnote{...\footnotemark ...}\footnotetext{...} 
(or so, with long footnotes, proper placement of the 
"inner" footnote may be difficult, cf. my hard work on edfnotes, 
http://ctan.org/pkg/edfnotes; please just consult any LaTeX 
documentation for \footnotemark and \footnotetext). 

HTH -- Uwe.