Re: [Docutils-users] weird footnotes in the generated LaTeX

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2017-01-28, Matěj Cepl wrote:

> I have written a bit longer document using rST (all discussed 
> files are in https://mcepl.fedorapeople.org/tmp/harry_potter/), 
> and then convered it to LaTeX just with plain rst2xetex (using 
> 0.13.1).

Mind, that despite the name, rst2xetex does not generate plain TeX for XeTeX
but LaTeX for XeTeX/LuaTeX (compile with `xelatex` or `xeluatex` commands).

> The resulting file is 
>   https://mcepl.fedorapeople.org/tmp/harry_potter/harry-potter-odpoved-brachovi.pdf
> and the problem I have it is that footnotes are quite often not 
> on the page they referred to (see page 8 for an example). 

This is a know problem of the LaTeX writer.

> Is there some configuration or something which would persuade 
> docutils not to mess with footenotes and use plain \footnote{} 
> in LaTeX?

There is just a TODO entry in docs/dev/todo.txt:

 * footnotes

  + True footnotes with LaTeX auto-numbering (as option ``--latex-footnotes``)
    (also for target-footnotes):

    - attach footnote text to footnote-symbol node
    - write \footnote{<footnote text>}
    - consider cases where LaTeX does not support footnotes
      (inside tables, headings, ...)?
    - consider multiple footnote refs to common footnote text.

The problem is that in the source, the footnote text is not known when the
footnote mark is parsed. We would need a transform to connect these so that
the footnote-mark is written as \footnote{<footnote text>}

Günter