I find the Paste Special as Text Only workflow incredibly destructive. I usually like the content I paste to have useful things like tables, fields, footnotes, cross-references, graphics etc. Having to recreate these after doing a Text only paste is a waste of my time. There are alternatives that can achieve the intent without resorting to text only. This will allow you to retain your footnotes without having to recreate them.

For instance, if BEFORE you copy the text, apply Normal style (Ctrl+Shift+N) to the selection and remove local formatting with Ctrl+Q and Ctrl-Space. Then make your copy and paste normally. The worst that will happen is you might introduce some unused custom style names to your target document. You can run a simple loop to delete those quickly if they bother you.

If you stick with the Text Only workflow, the footnotes themselves will remain an issue but you will also have to forensically hunt down all the footnote numbers scattered around in the text. You would need to put tags around all of these anchors before copying since they will convert to standard unformatted text after the paste as text only. I would experiment with converting to Endnotes in order to grab the footnotes in one easy way but realigning them with their original anchors is going to require lots of code.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia