Footnotes
Footnotes render at the bottom of the page, split across pages, and survive DOCX round-trips.
Legal briefs, academic papers, and financial reports rely on footnotes. Now they render exactly where they should — at the bottom of the page, in the right column, split across pages when they need to be.
The problem
Footnotes in DOCX files are structurally separate from the body text. The body contains a tiny <w:footnoteReference> marker; the actual footnote content lives in word/footnotes.xml. Rendering them correctly means reserving space at the bottom of each page, matching each reference to its content, and handling edge cases like footnotes that are longer than the remaining page space.
Most web editors punt on this — they either hide footnotes entirely, dump them at the end of the document, or render them inline. None of those work for documents where footnote placement matters.
Page-bottom rendering
Footnotes render at the bottom of the page that contains their reference, separated by a horizontal rule — matching Word's behavior. Superscript numbering is automatic: the reference in the body and the number at the start of the footnote content stay in sync.
Multi-column support
In multi-column layouts, footnotes appear in the correct column. If a footnote reference is in the left column, the footnote renders at the bottom of the left column — not the right one, and not spanning the full page width.
The layout engine determines column assignment by checking the x-position of the reference's fragment and mapping it to the corresponding column.
Large footnote splitting
When a footnote is too long to fit on the remaining page space, it splits across pages. The first part fills the available space; the rest continues at the bottom of the next page with a continuation separator (a wider line than the standard footnote separator, matching Word's convention).
The splitting works at the line level — paragraphs, list items, tables, and images within footnotes all split correctly.
Multi-pass layout
Adding a footnote reserve at the bottom of a page reduces the space available for body content. That can push body text — including other footnote references — to the next page. Which means the footnote reserves need to be recalculated.
The layout engine handles this with a multi-pass loop (up to 4 passes), with oscillation detection to prevent infinite loops when reserves bounce between pages. The result: footnotes always land on the correct page, even in documents where body content and footnote reserves compete for space.
DOCX round-trip
Footnotes survive import and export. Separator footnotes, continuation separators, custom mark footnotes, and w:footnotePr properties are all preserved. What you import is what you export.
Get started
No configuration needed. Load a DOCX with footnotes and they render automatically at the bottom of each page.