docling-project/docling

Improved Footnote Serialization in `MarkdownDocSerializer`

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#3,128 opened on Mar 14, 2026

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 (13 comments) (0 reactions) (1 assignee)Python (4,140 forks)batch import
docling-documentenhancementgood first issue

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Description

Requested feature

Currently, footnotes are serialized as part of MarkdownDocSerializer more or less as-is:

Serialized as:

5 https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

6 https://github.com/VikParuchuri/surya

7 https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR

Alternatives

For downstream LLM-based applications it would be helpful if footnotes were serialized as actual footnotes in Markdown Syntax for the LLM to indentify them as footnotes (and not as a numbered list, for example).

^[5 https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract]

^[6 https://github.com/VikParuchuri/surya]

^[7 https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR]

Contributor guide

Research direction
Locate the MarkdownDocSerializer class and modify the footnote serialization to use ^[footnote] syntax.
Tech stack
python
Domain
backend
Issue type
Feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-3 hours
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Clear
Prerequisites
Python
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
80