This is the bigfoot bundle for critical edition typesetting and other
concerns, written by David Kastrup (mailto:dak@gnu.org).  The complete
package in development can be accessed using the CVS instructions at
<URL:http://sarovar.org/projects/bigfoot>, and
CTAN:/macros/latex/contrib/bigfoot provides released versions.

The whole bundle is released under the GPL version 2 (or later), see
the file COPYING for details.  Part of the work has been sponsored or
commissioned by various parties (including TUG), but further
functionality and development depends on your support, financially or
by participation.  The author has a Paypal account which you might
consider contributing to.

All of the files (except perpage.sty, for historical reasons) need
eTeX 2 as the LaTeX engine.  All modern distributions provide this by
default.

A Makefile is provided for generating most files.  In case the
platform does not support Make, the distribution tarball includes the
file bigfoot.ins pregenerated from bigfoot.dtx.

File descriptions for available files:

bigfoot.ins: This is a generated file and not in the Git repository (but
   on CTAN).  Generating it can be done by running `tex docstrip' and
   answering the prompts

     \infileext=dtx
     \outfileext=ins
     \Options=installer
     \filelist=bigfoot

   If you instead use

     \Options=installer,make

   you will get a version of `bigfoot.ins' which will not ask before
   overwriting files, but will only place them in the current
   directory even if your docstrip configuration contains target
   directory declarations.

   Running TeX on bigfoot.ins will generate a number of style files
   (with the extension .sty) and a number of documentation driver
   files (with the extension .drv).


Here come the source files themselves:

suffix.dtx: This is the doc source for `suffix.sty', a package that
   makes it very easy to define command variants like \macro* or
   \macro\!.  It is included in the critical bundle since typical
   document classes for real critical editions documents will tend to
   want weird signs under handy abbreviations, like \< and \<<, or
   \=>, or things like \footnote' macros, or \footnote<...\footnote>
   with different formatting/numbering and so on.

perpage.dtx: This is the doc source for `perpage.sty'.  Used for
   keeping counters sorted in order of page appearance and making
   numbering per page possible.

bigfoot.dtx: This is the doc source for `bigfoot.sty'.  Used for
   solving every problem around footnotes and then some.  Deals with
   nested footnotes in several apparatus, uses a backtracking
   algorithm for finding the optimal break across several footnotes,
   automatically breaks in-paragraph style footnotes across pages,
   uses fuzzy logic for deciding about when to prefer in-paragraph
   layout to one-footnote-per-paragraph layout on a per-note and
   per-block basis, deals with colors in footnotes even when broken
   across pages, adapts the document class's footnote style to
   in-paragraph footnotes as good as it can, allows customization of
   styles differing across footnote blocks, allows verbatim text in
   footnotes and so on.