is the extra space at the start of LaTeX footnotes intentional ? (may stretch and give bad result)

[jfbu]

Consider the following index.rst:

========================
Bad spacing in footnotes
========================

Requirements:

 * `a short url
   <http://www.sphinx-doc.org/>`_.

 * `a long url
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=some+examples-of-extremely-extremely-extremely-extremely-extremely+very+long+URLs>`_.

 * `a short url
   <http://www.sphinx-doc.org/>`_.

and in conf.py::

# If true, show URL addresses after external links.
latex_show_urls = 'footnote'

I get from make latexpdf

This may seem a contrived example, but it occurred to me in real life from auto-generated links via intersphinx, and the use of 12pt font size, and a font with rather big glyphs. In the example above I inserted - to give a chance for the URL to break. This was the case of the auto-generated link in my real life case.

The problem is with the extra space token which comes from the \footnote's in the latex file: (tested on current master)

Requirements:
\begin{itemize}
\item {} 
\href{http://www.sphinx-doc.org/}{a short url}\footnote[1]{
http://www.sphinx-doc.org/
}.

\item {} 
\href{https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search\&search=some+examples-of-extremely-extremely-extremely-extremely-extremely+very+long+URLs}{a long url}\footnote[2]{
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search\&search=some+examples-of-extremely-extremely-extremely-extremely-extremely+very+long+URLs
}.

\item {} 
\href{http://www.sphinx-doc.org/}{a short url}\footnote[3]{
http://www.sphinx-doc.org/
}.

\end{itemize}

Is it intentional not to have \footnote[1]{% ? without it a space comes from the end of line. If one wants a space there, one should make it un-stretchable \footnote[1]{\mbox{ }%.

Here is without spaces (standard looks of american typography footnotes):

and here is with \mbox{ }%:

[tk0miya]

Thank you for reporting. I fixed at 6efdd07. (I used mbox for spacing)

[jfbu]

@tk0miya Thanks. I should have pointed out perhaps that arguably leaving the LaTeX default (no special spacing) was to be advised. Indeed some language modules for (LaTeX) babel customize this: I know in particular of French http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/babel-contrib/french/frenchb.pdf, which modifies footnotes to look like "1.<space>text" (see its default option FrenchFootnotes). Thus with the extra \mbox{ } this gives two spaces. I understand that English footnotes with the extra \mbox{ } look better (after all the French do it by default... plus the dot after the footnote number), but the LaTeX default does not have it. Probably there are LaTeX packages (I didn't check: http://ctan.org/topic/footnote) that English-speaking users can add to the preamble to modify the default looks if they want to. But the default LaTeX looks based on traditional English-speaking typography has no extra space. I should have made this clearer in my issue description sorry.

[jfbu]

A possibility would be for the latex builder to insert \sphinxAtStartFootnote macro rather than \mbox{ }. The sphinx.sty would then have \newcommand*\sphinxAtStartFootnote{\mbox{ }}, and this could be overwritten by user in conf.py using 'preamble' key.

As a general remark all macros defined in sphinx.sty should have a unique distinctive prefix, I used sphinx above. In LaTeX using macro names without prefix may easily lead to conflict if additional packages are loaded by user.

[tk0miya]

@jfbu Thank you for advice. I added the \sphinxAtStartFootnote macro now :-)

[jfbu]

@tk0miya Works great, thank you !

[jnothman]

At master, I'm getting code generated like:

dimensions \footnote[8]{\sphinxAtStartFootnote%\begin{enumerate}
\setcounter{enumi}{19}
\item {} 
...
\end{enumerate}

That % without a newline is a problem

[tk0miya]

@jnothman Thank you for reporting.
stable branch has same error. so I fixed it on stable.
It will be merged master later.

[jnothman]

Thanks for the fast fix!