fighting with footnotes

[ishamid <ishamid@lamar.colostate.edu>]

Dear posse,

I am having trouble with footnotes. For an article, I want some footnotes to
be symbolized by \ast, \dag, etc, but without affecting the numbering of
regular footnotes. For example, the title of article may have a footnote
symbolized by \ast, but the first footnote in the main text should still be
symbolized by `1' (then `2', etc). I tried localfootnotes but I could not get
them placed in the footer at the bottom of the page. [location=page] did not
help.

Related question: can't I just specify a footnote outside the counting
mechanism with any symbol I want at any point in the text, without disturbing
the regular counted footnotes?

I'm also confused by the conversion key. page 93 of the documentation reads:

"With the variable conversion you set up the type of numbering. You may even
use your own character, for example an emdash (keyed in as ---­)."

But if I do, e.g., conversion={---}, TeX complains of course. What am I
missing?

Related questions:

Where are the conversion keys set 2, set 3, etc. documented?

How can I reset the numbering if I make local changes? For example, I am using
regular default footnotes, then I switch to conversion=set 2, then I want to
reset to the default footnotes without losing my numbering. I thought that
[n=0] etc. might help but that key seems to affect the paragraph formatting of
the footnotes, not the numbering. I tried using \start-\stop but that does not
isolate the counting mechanism apparently.

Fighting TeX is really frustrating sometimes, and I'm sure the answers are
really simple...

Best
Idris