Footnotes and Captions in LaTeX

If you're putting an older book back into print you're going to have to deal with footnotes. Footnotes belong on the bottom of the page where they are referenced. Really long footnotes might be split across two pages. LaTeX is good at dealing with this, given the right sort of encouragement.

If your book has short paragraphs and few footnotes what rst2latex generates from RST footnote notation will be just fine. Just put the footnote right after the paragraph that refers to it like this:

RST

that I had been chosen to represent America at
Rheims. [#]_

.. [#] It is interesting to note that Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, the sole American entrant for the Gordon Bennett Balloon Cup in 1906; Mr. Edgar Mix, the only representative of America in the balloon contest in 1909, and Mr. Charles Weymann, the only entrant from America in the Gordon Bennett Aviation Cup race of 1911, held in England, all won.

TEX

that I had been chosen to represent America at
Rheims.\DUfootnotemark{id1}{id2}{1}
%
\DUfootnotetext{id2}{id1}{1}{%
It is interesting to note that Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, the sole American entrant for the Gordon Bennett Balloon Cup in 1906; Mr. Edgar Mix, the only representative of America in the balloon contest in 1909, and Mr. Charles Weymann, the only entrant from America in the Gordon Bennett Aviation Cup race of 1911, held in England, all won.
}

Unfortunately, some books have paragraphs that go on for pages and have multiple footnote references within them. What rst2latex generates will NOT put the footnotes where you want them to be. You will need to change the notation to this format:

Om!\footnote{This mystic monosyllable plays a prominent part in Sanskrit scriptural literature. Composed, according to some, of the letters a, u, and ma signifying Brahmā, Creator; Vishnu, Preserver; and Siva, Destroyer;—it expresses the three in One; and is said to possess great power spiritually.—T.} Salutation unto Vāsudeva!

The notation is simpler than what it replaces. Just put \footnote{} where you want the footnote to be referenced and put the text of the footnote inside the curly braces.

Next we need to deal with picture captions, which older books frequently have. Picture in LaTeX get put where LaTeX wants them to go. It will move them in the middle of paragraphs if it thinks the pages will break more nicely that way. LaTeX is mostly used for formatting scholarly papers and image captions are given numbers like Figure 1.1, etc. You can put a list of figures in your book with one LaTeX command.

That's the good news. The bad news is that LaTeX numbers figures in a different way than your book does. It wants to number them N.n where the first N is chapter number and the second n is the sequence number within the chapter. Older books don't use that system. They tend to number from the start of the book to the end, and may include frontspieces and plates that are not numbered at all. So in your LaTeX header we put this directive:

\usepackage[justification=centering]{caption}
\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup{font=footnotesize,labelformat=empty}

This tells LaTeX to center your captions, use the same font as used for footnotes, and do not label the captions with Figure N.n like it would do by default. So your images will be specified like this:

\begin{figure}
\noindent\makebox[\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=4.5in]{images/Image1.jpg}}

\caption{CURTISS' HUDSON RIVER FLIGHT OVER THE STATUE OF LIBERTY\\
Copyright, 1910, by The Pictorial News Co.}
\end{figure}

When you do a list of figures like this:

\clearpage{\pagestyle{empty}\cleardoublepage}

\tableofcontents %put toc in

\clearpage{\pagestyle{empty}\cleardoublepage}

\listoffigures

\mainmatter

the captions will be numbered in the list, but NOT in the actual caption of the image. You can live with that.

Last chapter: where to get old books to put back into print. Stay tuned.