What Survives When You Open a Word Document's Footnotes in the Browser
A specific, tested answer to whether footnotes survive importing a Word document into Piskes Drive — and an honest note about what that test does and doesn't prove.
"Will my footnotes survive?" is one of the more specific and legitimate worries people bring to any browser-based document tool before trusting it with a real Word file. It's a fair worry — footnote loss on import is a long-documented failure mode across the industry; Google's own support forums have years of threads on exactly this happening when pasting from Microsoft Word into Google Docs. So it's worth an actual, checked answer rather than a marketing claim.
What was tested
Drive imports .docx files using mammoth, a widely used library for converting Word documents into structured content. The test suite for this path (frontend/apps/drive/src/lib/office/footnote.test.ts) checks a Drive-generated .docx file against mammoth version 1.12 specifically, and the result is that footnote bodies, the reference markers pointing to them, and the back-links from footnote back to reference all survive the import with no warnings raised. Notably, this directly contradicts a stale comment that was sitting in the code claiming mammoth "simply never emits" footnotes — that comment was wrong, and the test exists precisely because someone checked rather than trusted it.
What this doesn't prove
Here's the honest limit, and it matters: this is a test against one specific corpus — a Drive-generated .docx file, checked against one specific version of one specific import library. It is not a claim that every footnote in every Word document, regardless of how it was produced or how unusually it's formatted, will survive import into Drive. A .docx file produced by a different tool, with footnotes structured in a way this particular test didn't exercise, is a different question that this test doesn't answer.
The test file itself is explicit about this scope — it's documenting a specific, checked result, not asserting a universal guarantee. That's the right way to read this claim: footnotes from a standard, well-formed Word document have a real, tested path through Drive's import that preserves them intact. If you're working with an unusual or heavily customized document, the honest answer is to import it and check, the same way you'd check with any tool making a similar claim, rather than assume the tested result generalizes automatically to every file you might throw at it.
That kind of specificity — here's exactly what we tested, here's exactly what it showed, here's what it doesn't tell you — is a more useful answer than either "yes, footnotes work" or a vague disclaimer, and it's the standard worth holding any import claim to.