[OS X TeX] Multicolumn footnotes

[Stephen Anderson]

Again, what I want to do is to produce a document in which pages are formatted as two columns, with footnotes confined to the column in which they are invoked. The multicol package lets me set up the basic page format, with \columnbreak separating the French text on a page from the English translation. But all of the footnotes end up, by default, at the bottom and spread across the whole page. Various packages have been devised to alter the footnote placement, but I can’t find any that do what I need. There are packages that will put the footnotes into two columns, even if the text is in a single column, but don’t allow me to separate the ones relevant to the first column from those relevant to the second.  There are packages that put all of the footnotes under the second column, but that’s no help. The manyfoot package allows you to do all sorts of funny things with the footnotes, but not, as far as I can see, to separate them into two distinguishable columns in the way I want. And various people on the web say that (in effect) that it’s impossible to do what I want.

However, it appears that there is a solution: the paracol package (not mentioned in my copy of the LaTeX Companion) seems to do what I want. Initial efforts require some further tweaking, but at least it gets the footnotes right. It (and the — less satisfactory for my purposes — parallel package) are designed for precisely the kind of task I have in mind: bilingual texts in coordinated columns.

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Steve Anderson