Foot­notes are in­cluded with the ad­vanced lay­out top­ics not be­cause they’re ty­po­graph­i­cally dif­fi­cult, but be­cause pry­ing their ty­pog­ra­phy from the maw of your word proces­sor can be a chore. If you’re un­daunted, the de­fault for­mat­ting of foot­notes is flawed in sev­eral ways that are worth fixing:

1. The foot­note sep­a­ra­tor is a hor­i­zon­tal line. Delete the line and just use some ex­tra white space. (It’s fine, how­ever, to use a line sep­a­ra­tor for a foot­note continuation.)

2. Foot­note-ref­er­ence num­bers in the body text are set in the same font, just smaller and su­per­scripted. These num­bers should be no­tice­able de­spite their size. If they don’t stand out enough, try mak­ing them bold, or even run­ning them in a dif­fer­ent font (a sans serif, perhaps).

3. The ref­er­ence num­bers on the foot­notes are also shrunken su­per­scripts. There’s no need for this. They can be the same size as the rest of the foot­note text.

4. The ref­er­ence num­bers on the foot­notes are in­dented. I pre­fer foot­notes to have a neg­a­tive first-line in­dent so that the ref­er­ence num­ber is aligned to the left edge of the text block, and then all the lines of the foot­note can be in­dented the same amount. (An ef­fect demon­strated in this paragraph.)