Latex: kerning between footnote marks and punctuation marks

Question

Not the same as " footnote spacing in latex ".

When I add footnotes in latex, there is often a little bit of space due to the punctuation mark before them:

I can't help but feel this might be a little bit nicer if the footnote mark was a tiny tiny bit to the left, sort of like kerning. Any ideas how to do this? Especially if it automatically decides if it should do the kerning (as opposed to have one footnote with ! and one without).

Answer 1

You can add a small negative space using \\! between the punctuation mark and the footnote.

As Jouni commented, \\! is a math mode command causing latex to switch into math mode. This can be prevented by using the amstex package.

Answer 2

There is now the fnpct package that should do what you want automatically. It actually came from a related question on the TeX sister site: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/56094/is-there-a-way-to-automatically-change-kerning-between-commas-full-stops-and-foo