I felt a little bad about asking everyone else to do my work for me, so I did take a stab at solving my footnote line-break issue :). I came up with something that seems to work, but I'm not sure it is the simplest or best way to do it. Basically, I used something from your last post (the \specialcommand) to turn off the default footnote number completely and instead include the footnote number as part of the footnote text:

% Create a counter that will act as our footnote labels
\newcounter\MyFootnoteLabel

% Create a special command to turn off the default footnote number
\def\TurnOffDefFootNum#1{}

% Set up footnoting in paragraph form (n=0) with no default footnote number
\setupfootnotes[n=0,way=bypage,numbercommand=\TurnOffDefFootNum]

% Create macro to replace standard footnote macro. This macro will include
% the footnote number as part of the footnote text so that we can keep it from
% getting split onto a different line from the footnote text
\def\fnote#1{\footnote[\MyFootnoteLabel]{\note[\MyFootnoteLabel]~#1}\increment\MyFootnoteLabel}

% Test with some output
\starttext

Now\fnote{Footnote number one} %
is\fnote{Footnote number two} %
the\fnote{Footnote number three} %
time\fnote{Footnote number four} %
for\fnote{Footnote number five} %
all\fnote{Footnote number six} %
good\fnote{Footnote number seven} %
men\fnote{Footnote number eight} %
to\fnote{Footnote number nine} %
come\fnote{Footnote number ten} %
to\fnote{Footnote number eleven} %
the\fnote{Footnote number twelve} %
aid\fnote{Footnote number thirteen} %
of\fnote{Footnote number fourteen} %
their\fnote{Footnote number fifteen} %
country.\fnote{Footnote number sixteen} %

\stoptext

I put a non-breaking space in this example, but it seems to work with no space there as well. It is hard to get a number to split on purpose anyway, but I found that by successively adding "i" characters to any footnote text, I could eventually cause the next footnote to leave its number on one line and its text on the next. However, after the above, the first word of the footnote text seems to stay with the footnote number regardless, which is what I wanted.

I would be interested in knowing though if there is a simpler solution.

Also, any idea what might be causing some whole footnotes to appear on, say, page 11, when the text that references the footnote is on page 10? Is this something I just have to fix by tweaking my main text?

Jeff Dodson