[XeTeX] custom footnote rules w/ ednotes, polyglossia & bidi

[talazem at fastmail.fm]

Hi Alan et al,

Thank you for your kind help. You understood perfectly what was required. I used what you mentioned of defining a newcommand for the \left at footnoterule rule, did the same for a right at footnoterule, and have what I needed now. The document is now compiling and being produced as desired. Thank you again. 

However, it is producing some non-critical errors, and as such, I have a further wrinkle that I'd like to iron out.

Because the majority of my document (a doctoral thesis) is left-to-right, and only a certain section is right-to-left (the short critical edition of a text), I do not want the document's footnoterule to universally be changed to RtL. As such:
(a) I have not used the proposed " \PrecedeLevelWith{A}{\setRL} " command;
(b) in it's stead, I have redefined my variant footnotes of \Anote as follows:
	\SetFootnoteHook{\setRL}
	\SelectFootnoteRule[1]{rt}
	\DeclareNewFootnote[para]{A}[alph]

Like I said, this compiles, and the output is visually what I desire, but I get the following error:

	Later Error: Command \FootnotetextA already defined. 
		Or name \end... illegal, see p.192 of the manual.
		...
	1.38 \DeclareNewFootnote[para]{A}[alph]

Naturally, I'd rather get no errors; I want to be sure that I am not messing up something else inadvertently.

Basically, it appears that XeLaTeX/ednotes is not liking my "declaring" level A of the variant footnote (\Anote), since it is inherently already declared (defined) by ednotes itself when you load it. What should I do to avert this?

You also mentioned that the marker could easily be changed not with ednotes, but with manyfoot. Do you mean by this something other than what you've already kindly suggested?

Many thanks once again to all who have helped.

Kind regards,
Talal

p.s.  While Vafa's comments didn't help me solve the problem, it is clear from experimenting with what he said that there is a conflict between bidi and ednotes, either in the latter's calling up the lineno package (since bidi's "fulltextwidth" command didn't work when I invoked lineno in a minimal example file), or with the manyfoot package. These packages probably aren't sufficiently aware of the complexities of bidi, and thus the problems. It is, as Vafa states, probably not bidi's fault, but the conflict exists all the same. Interestingly, bidi's "autofootnoterule" actually does seem to work fine, once you learn (as I did eventually did) that you have to start a \newpage to ensure that the automatic direction is correct on a page in which the text's direction subsequently changes. Nonetheless, it doesn't give the type of granular control I was requesting for each level of ednote's scholarly footnotes, for which I am much grateful to Alan's help above.



On 25 Jul 2010, at 18:43, Alan Munn wrote:

> Hi Wafa and Talal,
> 
> Wafa, I'm afraid you've misunderstood Talal's requirements.  His problem is not simply to get a RTL footnote marker; he needs one in the context of multiple footnote apparatus as supplied by the ednotes/manyfoot package.  This is a requirement for the kind of critical edition that he is writing.
> 
> Talal, I've attached a sample file that I think does most of what you want. Please note that I don't work with critical editions and the ednotes package is about the worst documented package I've ever seen, so I don't really understand much of what the expected output is supposed to be.
> 
> Some comments about what I did:
> 
> It seems that you want the first set of footnotes to be Arabic with a RTL rule; to do this, I had to reset the default footnote marker to a right footnote marker, since there doesn't seem to be a way to change the marker using ednotes (even though it could easily be changed using manyfoot).  I then created a lftrule for use with the second series of footnotes, and redefined the extrarule to be empty for the third set.
> 
> With respect to using the RTL marker for just one chapter, I couldn't figure out a way to redefine the A series footnotes within the document.  Perhaps the easiest way around this is to create a fourth footnote series and use that in subsequent chapters as your first set.  Again, ednotes isn't very well documented, so I don't know how this would work in practice.
> 
> Hopefully though, the attached code will give you something to work on.
> 
> Alan
> <fnotes2.tex>
> 
> 
> 
> On Jul 24, 2010, at 9:47 PM, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 3:18 AM, talazem at fastmail.fm <talazem at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>> I'm sorry, I mistyped. Of course \setRTLmarginpar has nothing to do with it. I meant \setRTL, because I am using ednotes (which uses manyfoot). I have three levels of footnotes. I want to define the footnote rule of one level (level B, for example) as right-to-left, but the others leave the LtR. I have tried to simply use \rightfootnoterule for the definition of my "level B" of footnotes, but this did not work.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> see attached file. The commands clearly works.
>> 
>> -- 
>> Best wishes,
>> Vafa Khalighi
>> <test.tex><test.pdf>
>> 
>> --------------------------------------------------
>> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>> http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
> 
> -- 
> Alan Munn
> amunn at gmx.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex