Footnotes in LaTeX section headings

The \footnote command is fragile, so that simply placing the command in \section’s arguments isn’t satisfactory. Using \protect\footnote isn’t a good idea either: the arguments of a section command are used in the table of contents and (more dangerously) potentially also in page headers. While footnotes will work in the table of contents, it’s generally not thought a “good thing” to have them there; in the page header, footnotes will simply fail. Whatever the desirability of the matter, there’s no mechanism to suppress the footnote in the page header while allowing it in the table of contents, so the footnote may only appear in the section heading itself.

To suppress the footnote in headings and table of contents:

• Take advantage of the fact that the mandatory argument doesn’t ‘move’ if the optional argument is present:

  \section[title] {title\footnote{title ftnt}}

• Use the footmisc package, with package option stable — this modifies footnotes so that they softly and silently vanish away if used in a moving argument. With this, you simply need:

  % in the document preamble
  \usepackage[stable]{footmisc}
  ...
  % in the body of the document
  \section{title\footnote{title ftnt}}