Feature Request: Footnote size and spacing

[folofjc]

The SBL style guide gives a bit of freedom to the size of footnotes. The default in biblatex-sbl is 10 point. However, some journals that use the SBL guide specify that footnotes should be 12 point font just like the main body. For example, Journal of Biblical Literature, see Section 2.2.

It would be great to add an option to the package to set the font size for footnotes, as well as double spacing the footnotes (as in the above JBL requirements).

[dcpurton]

LaTeX supports this out of the box, just add \renewcommand{\footnotesize}{\normalsize} to your preamble. sbl-paper.sty does not do very much special to default footnote settings except the following:

\usepackage[bottom]{footmisc}% provides commands below
\renewcommand\footnoterule{\kern-3pt \hrule width 2in \kern 2.6pt\vskip -8pt}% 2in line
\renewcommand\footnotelayout{\raggedright}% ragged right
\setlength{\footnotemargin}{0.5in}% right indent
\setlength{\footnotesep}{18pt}% right separation from text

Is this good enough?

[folofjc]

That is what I am doing to solve it, and it works for a paper I am working on right now. I have noticed in the past, however, working with other packages that messing around with footnotesize can have some unintended consequences when other people use that (as is also noted in the answer here). I wasn't sure if it would mess other things up, especially with the use of polyglossia, etc. If that is all it takes, then that works for me! I just wanted to be sure, thanks for the help!

[dcpurton]

Ah. Yes, you are right. That stack exchange answer is better. I'll think about it.

[folofjc]

I am using the problem in #48 as an "undocumented feature" to get double spaced footnotes, as is required by JBL (as in the original comment above). Is there any easy way to add that capability? Seems to me like having the option for both (with single space as the default) would be an ideal solution. Thanks!

[dcpurton]

Untested, but does \renewcommand{\footnotelayout}{\doublespacing\raggedright} space the footnotes correctly?

[dcpurton]

It seems like it would be useful to be able to pass a style option to sbl-paper.sty to specify student style or jbl style, etc. For simple style differences this shouldn't be too hard. But I'm not sure if it's worth trying to support many different styles in what is meant to be basically just an example.

[folofjc]

Yeah, I wasn't thinking a whole bunch of different styles. I was merely thinking that since the SBLHS leaves a couple options open, and since the JBL (published by same organization that came up with SBLHS and SBLHS Student Supplement) does something different than the student supplement, it might be good to allow for these differences. Any other changes to SBLHS that other people make, I agree that it should be up to the user.

I really need to get better at pure TeX so I can know how to do some of this myself. Thanks for all your help! I'll try the above in a little bit.

[folofjc]

The above does indeed appear to work. I left in the maketitle command, and added the above in the preamble. Looks okay to me at first glance. Thanks!

[folofjc]

One more question/comment about sbl-paper.tex. Your example uses the book class, but this doesn't have an option for an abstract. Have you tested with the article class? Any thoughts on whether sbl-paper.sty would or wouldn't work with a different class?

[dcpurton]

Actually, I think I should just re-implement the whole thing as a class based on memoir which allows for much easier tweaking of just about everything.

Maybe I could make it a separate package.

In answer to you book question, it should work with article class just fine.

[dcpurton]

Ha! It's way easier in memoir. I should have used that to start with. It shouldn't take too long to have a style that supports a student style and a JBL style. Even and SBL book style will be easy enough.

[folofjc]

Awesome! Sounds great. Looking forward to it!

[jackweinbender]

I'm working on a semi-modular dissertation class, based on memoir, too.