I would like to take the contents from Microsoft Word files and convert them into WordPress blog posts without losing the footnotes. I’ve tried many different methods but have not found a simple working solution to this basic issue. The ideal solution would automatically upload a Word file (or many files) to a WordPress blog and convert the footnotes to HTML anchors.
How can I publish Word files to a WordPress blog without losing the footnotes?
WordPress Core does not support converting DOC files into posts. You might want to look at the range of importers that are available: Importing Content (WordPress Codex).
However the concept to import text into one blog post looks like a refreshing new concept to wordpress, core does not support anything at all of that.
Basically if you can convert something into a HTML fragment, you can just copy/paste that HTML over into the HTML editor of the post.
HTML has nothing like footnotes, so the conversion will lack of that feature and can only simulate footnotes then.
I was attempting to do the same thing. I found cloudconvert which seems to do a nice job of this (no affiliation to me). It’s not a drop-in solution but it is something that could work. They have a free tier of usage and reasonable prices beyond that.
You can also try just using the ‘Save as HTML’ from Word which gets pretty close.