Btukfyl

I would like to have a footnote about the funding source of my work in the first page without marker.

I tried below approaches:

1. footnotetext{text goes here}
   This creates a footnote but with '0' as marker. However, the marker reference does not
   appear within the normal text where I placed this command.



2. 
   

   Used defblfootnote{xdef@thefnmark{}@footnotetext} definition provided at http://help-csli.stanford.edu/tex/latex-footnotes.shtml#unnumber. I placed this definition in the main tex file just after package declaration.
   But, this gives the below error.

   
   
   

      ! Use of @ doesn't match its definition.
   
      blfootnote ->xdef @thefnmark{}@f
   
                                          ootnotetext
   
   

   
   

As Stephen mentioned in his answer, if you're using your definition in your .tex file, you need to enclose it inside makeatletter, makeatother. Another option not involving the use of the special character @ (thus not requiring makeatletter, makeatother) would be to locally redefine thefootnote (taking care of correcting the footnote counter):

documentclass{article}

usepackage{lipsum}



newcommandblfootnote[1]{%

  begingroup

  renewcommandthefootnote{}footnote{#1}%

  addtocounter{footnote}{-1}%

  endgroup

}



begin{document}



Some textblfootnote{A footnote without marker} and some more textfootnote{A standard footnote}



end{document}

@ is a special character in (La)TeX. Enclose your code with makeatletter, makeatother:

makeatletter

defblfootnote{gdef@thefnmark{}@footnotetext}

makeatother

Edit (from my former comments):

Internal commands with @ can be used without makeatletter and makeatother in the class file (as you found out) as well as in style files, too. Only in the .tex file the "envelope" is needed. That said, I would prefer Gonzalo Medina's answer over my own (or your placement of the redefinition in the class file) because it only locally redefines footnote (respectively give a new command for unnumbered footnotes).

When you are using the hyperref package, you would probably want to add addtocounter{Hfootnote}{-1}% to the code of GM, otherwise it will work but error messages about (hyper)footnotes will become tricky, because e.g. Hfootnote 42 then is footnote 41 - use addtocounter{footnote}{-1} without addtocounter{Hfootnote}{-1} for several cases, and the difference between footnote and Hfootnote makes debugging harder than necessary.

Edit (again):

As suggested by egreg, I changed xdef (=globaledef) to gdef (=globaldef), because there is no need to *e*xpand the *def*inition's content here (as it is just empty).

In some cases, you might want to suppress the number on a footnote. I looked around the web, and a few suggestions were out there, but the simplest one I could find was the following:

letthefootnoterelaxfootnotetext{Put your text here}

There’s also an old package, titlefoot, which has no documentation except a few comments in the .sty file. It provides a command, unmarkedfntext{...}, which has never caused problems in my documents. A little example:

documentclass{article}

usepackage{blindtext,titlefoot}

title{My Brilliant Article}

author{Me}

usepackage{hyperref}

begin{document}

maketitleunmarkedfntext{Originally published by Oxford.}



blindtextfootnote{It seems to play well with hyperref.}

end{document}

You could use the footnotemarker[0] and footnotetext[0]{Footnote text} pair. The [0] will suppress the label.