Dear colleagues Please find attached a patch that fixes an issue in recent elsarticle.cls (3.0). The problem is that you forgot to check the existence of the titlefootnote (tnote) label (\X@t<n>) in \tnotemark (as opposed to the other labels in other contexts, where you check with \elsRef). As a consequence, you get a "missing number" LaTeX error on the first LaTeX run (before the labels are written to the aux file). This is a problem with editors that break compilations on LaTeX errors (such as LyX, which currently cannot process elsarticle documents with title footnotes).
Please consider this patch for the next release of the class. Thanks in advance, Jürgen
--- /usr/local/texlive/2018/texmf-dist/tex/latex/elsarticle/elsarticle.cls +++ /tmp/meld-tmpvss9c3st @@ -123,7 +123,7 @@ \def\tnotemark[#1]{} \else \def\tnotemark[#1]{\@for\mytmark:=#1\do{% - \expandafter\ifcase\csname X@\mytmark\endcsname\or$^{\star}$\or + \expandafter\ifcase\elsRef{\mytmark}\or$^{\star}$\or $^{,\star\star}$\fi }% }