[Tex/LaTex] Letters as footnote symbols on titlepage

Question

I'm trying to format paper so that one the title page I can use 'a'as my symbol for footnote by the author's name. I tried to use the \renewcommand
{\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{a} but that only changes the top symbol, not the bottom. This is my code:

\begin{document}  

\begin{titlepage}

\title{My paper}

\author{
{\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{a}
Me\footnote{info} }}

\maketitle

\end{titlepage}

when I compile this, I get the 'a' as the superscript, but at the bottom of the page I just get an '*'. Any idea why this keeps happening?

Answer 1

Inside author is supposed to be an environment.. and outside it changes to it's default. So you have to give the command inside and outside the title environment. (For this reason I defined '\myalph' command to mke your document clear.) . Also even with the command inside and outside the author environment you need a trick because footnote command asks for the default footnotemark from the author environment. The trick is to give the footnotemark inside author and type it later using footnotetext.

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

%opening
\title{}
\author{}

\newcommand{\myalphfoot}
{
\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\alph{footnote}}
}
\begin{document}  

\begin{titlepage}

\title{My paper \footnote{test}}
\myalphfoot

\author{
\myalphfoot
Me\footnotemark[1] }

\footnotetext[1]{info}
\maketitle

\end{titlepage}


test\footnote{test2}

\end{document}