[texhax] Horizontal Footnotes in Critical Editions

[Uwe Lück]

At 10:36 07.09.05, Chris Yocum wrote:

>few moments to help.  I read the documentation then put
>\usepackage{ednotes} in the preamble of my document.  I put the
>document through pdflatex and recieved 43 errors and I did not even
>put a command in the document, just the \usepackage.  I took a look at
>the log file and I found this "(C:\texmf\tex\latex\psnfss\ot1ptm.fd
>File: ot1ptm.fd 2001/06/04 font definitions for OT1/ptm.
>)
>! Arithmetic overflow.
>\MFL at floathook ...eskip \multiply \@tempdima 1024
>                                                   \divide \@tempdima 
> \column..."
>      I took a look at ledmac but found the documentation so daunting
>that I would rather use ednotes if possible.

Thank you for the bug report and the .log data. I would like to see the
other errors, so please send me the entire .log (may be just to
uwe.lueck at web.de).

The overflow happens as soon as the \footnotesize \baselineskip
exceeds 16 pt, while in standard LaTeX this doesn't exceed 12 pt.
So are you preparing slides? I would also like to see your preamble.

[This mainly addresses the package authors:]
Maybe the relevant algorithm in manyfoot must be changed.
Numerics (which is the manyfoot' author' profession) teach
to multiply before dividing in order to minimize rounding errors,
while it may be better to change this order in the present situation.
Oh, a better idea would be to precede the multiplication by 1024
with dividing by 8 (e.g.) and insert multiplication by 8
immediately after dividing by \columnwidth (or replace 1024
by 128 and 64 by 512). (This might be done on a `slides'
option as well.)

According to this diagnosis (which I am not 100% sure about)
the problem would be the same with the recent version of ledmac,
because it multiplies the \footnotesize \baselineskip by 1024
before dividing (at the analogous point) as well.

I could send a patch if the package authors don't react,
but please send the additional informations before any
package author works on the macros.

Lucky typesetting,
Uwe Lueck.