Footnotes Without Text Marks?

[John McChesney-Young <panis@pacbell.net>]

Dear Listmembers,

Is there a command or work-around in ConTeXt that's comparable to 
Plain TeX's \vfootnote, to generate a footnote without a reference 
mark in the text? I found options for marks with numbers, Roman 
numerals, and letters (cont-enp.pdf, p. 83/99) but nothing for an 
invisible mark.

I apologize for what might be a very obvious question, but I don't 
find an answer in the manual nor via a Google advanced search of the 
Pragma-ADE domain. I checked the archives and found a discussion from 
last February in which Idris Hamid asked about changing symbol 
options, to which Hans Hagen helpfully responded with a sample set-up:

\setupfootnotes
    [conversion=HowAboutIt]

\defineconversion
    [HowAboutIt]
    [One,Two,Three]

I tried substituting both \null and {} for the "One,Two,Three" but 
neither worked.

There was also some discussion of a proposed command 
\setupfootnotemarker early and late last year, but I wasn't clear on 
whether or how it had been implemented.

I've also been following the French hyphenation thread with some 
interest; my outputs of all the samples posted so far (with TeXShop 
1.34) have unfortunately displayed <A-macron><copyright symbol> for 
the original <e-aigue>, and the word at the line end doesn't 
hyphenate (the console reports an overfull \hbox, as I would expect).

I'm very new to *TeX, have always worked with Macs (since OS 7.1), 
and have essentially no Unix experience, so answers that assume 
wholesale ignorance will be best appreciated and understood. :-)

Thanks very much!

John
-- 


*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis@pacbell.net  **   Berkeley, 
California, U.S.A.  ***