Splitting footnotes

Splitting footnotes

[Matt Gushee]

Hello, folks--

I am trying to typeset a book that has many footnotes; most of them are 
of moderate length, but a few are terribly long[*]. I am trying to use 
\setupfootnotes[split=*], but so far haven't got good results. You see, 
there is only one footnote that really needs to be split across pages 
(it takes up about two-thirds of a page); if I use [split=tolerant], 
many footnotes get split, which I would like to avoid, but if I say 
[split=strict], the longest one does not get split. I have also tried 
numeric values, but that doesn't seem to do anything. So my 
questions/comments are:

  1. What does a numeric value represent, and what is the range of useful
     values? I first tried fairly small values like 1, 10, 25, thinking
     it was the number of lines, then thought it might be a tolerance
     value (as in \badness), and tried 1000 and 10000. None of these
     numbers had any effect.

  2. It seems there is a very large gap between 'strict' and 'tolerant'.
     Might it not be a good idea to have four steps, e.g. 'verystrict',
     'strict', 'tolerant', and 'verytolerant'; or 'verystrict', 'strict',
     'medium', and 'tolerant'?


  [*] Of course, the ideal solution would be to edit or delete the overly
      long ones. However, I'm working with a well-known 19th century
      text. Thus, it's in the public domain and I can legally do
      whatever I want with it, but I don't feel it would be appropriate
      to make substantive alterations to the content.

-- 
Matt Gushee
: Bantam - lightweight file manager : matt.gushee.net/software/bantam/ :
: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language :     matt.gushee.net/rascl/ :
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