LaTeX

Full Control Over Footnote Placement for memoir

This is a follow-up to LuaLaTeX Footnote Maze, which documented the long road to making memoir paragraph footnotes work inside breakable tcolorbox environments with hyperref. That solved half the problem. This post solves the rest of the problem: deciding exactly where on the page footnotes appear.

Downloads: memoir-fnqueue.sty · memoir-tcolorbox.sty · test-fn.tex · test-fn.py

The Remaining Gap #

After the earlier work, footnotes escaped their tcolorbox prisons and rendered as proper paragraph footnotes with working hyperref links. But placement was still automatic—footnotes released at the end of a box landed wherever TeX’s page builder decided, sometimes colliding with other content when the combined height of sidebar plus footnotes barely exceeded the page.

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LuaLaTeX Footnote Maze

LuaLaTeX Footnote Maze #

UPDATE 2025-12-04: Sidebar Footnote Collision Problem #

Testing revealed a critical issue: when a sidebar with footnotes barely fits on a page, the footnotes can collide with the sidebar content. The sidebar itself fits, but the combination of sidebar plus footnotes exceeds available space, causing collisions with page content and page numbers.

The problem occurs regardless of sidebar length. Tests with varying sidebar sizes—from compact to extended—all demonstrated collisions when the total height (sidebar + footnotes) was just over the page limit.

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