Option to merge footnotes with main text

[ntsarb]

Hello,

I am testing docling with PDF documents containing footnotes. I observe that the latter are identified, but they aren't linked to the text from where the reference is made (See example below). I note the PDF files contain the text, not scanned images, and the footnote references in the body are in superscript.

It would be very useful if:

• the footnote text was linked (parent-child) with its "parent" text.
• we had a CLI option --merge_footnotes, to automatically embed the footnotes into the main text, as separate sentenses (e.g. in brackets, in place of the original footnote reference), for RAG applications.

With kind regards

Nikos

    {
      "self_ref": "#/texts/1",
      "parent": {
        "$ref": "#/body"
      },
      "children": [],
      "content_layer": "body",
      "label": "text",
      "prov": [
        {
          "page_no": 1,
          "bbox": {
            "l": 72.025,
            "t": 744.1780000000001,
            "r": 508.35599999999994,
            "b": 703.653,
            "coord_origin": "BOTTOMLEFT"
          },
          "charspan": [
            0,
            223
          ]
        }
      ],
      "orig": "5G is reaching a ... areas outside of premises. 1",
      "text": "5G is reaching a ... areas outside of premises. 1"
    },
    {
      "self_ref": "#/texts/5",
      "parent": {
        "$ref": "#/body"
      },
      "children": [],
      "content_layer": "body",
      "label": "footnote",
      "prov": [
        {
          "page_no": 1,
          "bbox": {
            "l": 72.047,
            "t": 80.79499999999996,
            "r": 496.556,
            "b": 69.98800000000006,
            "coord_origin": "BOTTOMLEFT"
          },
          "charspan": [
            0,
            105
          ]
        }
      ],
      "orig": "1 Please refer to ... are defined",
      "text": "1 Please refer to ... are defined"
    },