Re: Why is an explicit footnote mark not printed in the footnote?

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> As per NR 3.2.4 it is possible to specify an explicit footnote mark as
> opposed to the automatic number. However, in this case the mark is
> *not* repeated in the footnote itself. The examples in the section
> show that this is not a bug but known behaviour:
>
> \footnote "*" #'(0.5 . -2) \markup { \italic "* The first note" } a'4
>
> But I'd like to ask if there's a reasoning behind that. I can't think
> of a case where you'd not want to have matching marks in the
> annotation and the footnote. Wouldn't it be better to have that
> automatically, like with automatic numbers?

A common use case is a raised mark for the reference but a fullsize mark
for the note itself.  The explicit footnote mark code is intended to be
able to cater for such special cases.  The only way to sensibly do that
is to leave the formatting of the marks in the note to the user.

-- 
David Kastrup