# How do I preserve footnotes when converting a PDF to EPUB?

Source: https://epubcc.com/answers/how-to-preserve-footnotes/ (updated 2026-11-04)

To preserve footnotes, the converter has to recognise them as notes and link each one from its call in the text, instead of leaving them as small text in the middle of the book. EpubCC writes them as EPUB footnotes linked from the superscript that calls them.

## How a footnote is recognised

- Smaller type than the body text, in the lower half of the page, below the body text on the same page.
- Starting with a marker (a number or a symbol) that matches a superscript call on that page.
- Pages made only of small type, such as endnotes, are kept as normal paragraphs.

## What the EPUB gets

Each note becomes an EPUB 3 footnote at the end of its chapter, and each call becomes a link to it. Readers that support pop-up notes show it without leaving the page.

## Limits

Notes that don't follow those patterns stay as text and are reported. The benchmark measures text, not whether every note was linked, so this is checked by hand on the corpus.