Hello Jim, I found that this exemple is distracting, it was hard to understand to me --- probably because, like many people who will read this manual, I am not a native English speaker, and not so familiar with anglo-saxon protestants' culture.
I have found this: https://fkaplan.wordpress.com/tag/notes-de-bas-de-page/ En 1776, quand Edward Gibbon publie History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, l’esthétique de la continuité romanesque a déjà gagné. Ses notes sont reléguées en fin de volume pour ne pas briser l’immersion de la lecture. Sur les conseils de Hume, il demande le rétablissement des notes en bas de page dans l’édition suivante, mais regrettera ce choix dans ses mémoires. This means that in the 1st release of Gibbon's book the notes were at the end of the book, Hume advised Gibbon to use footnotes instead of endnotes in the next version published. Gibbon did that, but then he wished he wouldn't have, as stated in his memories. >From the text that you give in latexrefman all of this is unclear and distracting, because the reader does not know that the early version --- that about which D. Hume was complaining --- had endnotes instead of footnotes, so you get the feeling that Hume was unhappy with the amount of notes, rather than how they are typeset, and you cannot understand his advise to use footnotes or marginnotes, I propose to rephrase as follows: @example There are over a thousand footnotes in Gibbon's \textit@{Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire@}.\footnote@{After reading an early version in which the notes were not at the bottom of pages but at the end of the book, David Hume complained, ``One is also plagued with his Notes, according to the present Method of printing the Book'' and suggested that they ought ``only to be printed at the Margin or the Bottom of the Page.''@} @end example where I added only in which the notes were not at the bottom of pages but at the end of the book and ought Well, this makes the example quite a bit too long, but all of the length is within a footnote, so nobody is going to read it :-D Vincent.
