This is a rare case, but you may face it, when you use Adobe Acrobat to convert MS Word documents to pdf. After conversion finishes you may notice (in the main text, not in the footnote area) small lines at the bottom left corner below footnotes.

No matter what options you change before conversion, such as letting Acrobat create bookmarks or not, etc., these small dashes or dots remain, spoiling your text.

The only solution I managed to find — actually it even resulted in a better quality, but heavier in MBs, pdf document — was to avoid the pdf conversion option that is offered by Acrobat in the File menu of Word, and use instead the Print option, then select Acrobat as the printer.

There I defined the quality that I wanted for my document and after conversion finished everything was perfect — without lines below footnote numbers.