footnote spacing in LaTeX

I'm writing my dissertation and the grad school says I need a space between multiple footnotes and also the space between the text and the start of the footnotes is too small. Is there a way to do this?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

From stackoverflow

• \footnotesep is the space between footnotes:

  \setlength{\footnotesep}{0.5cm}
  

  \footins is the space between the text body and the footnotes:

  \setlength{\skip\footins}{2cm}
  

  You might want to play around with the actual numbers, I've just chosen some values where you will actually see the difference.

  Rich : Thanks for this Torsten!

• There's also a LaTeX package, footmisc, that's useful for manipulating footnote formatting.