Currently, the docx writer produces footnotes that contain the footnote reference (i.e. superscript number) followed immediately by the text of the note. It appears like this:

By default, inserting a footnote in Word inserts the footnote reference and then a space, so most or many Word documents normally have a single space between reference and the text. The Pandoc reader I use (org-mode) discards whitespace at the beginning of the note, so it's not possible to simply type an extra space in the source document. A literal nonbreaking space in the input produces the desired effect, at the cost of having to remember to manually insert it in every footnote.

Better yet would be to have a tab character following the reference, so that the paragraph style may be used to align footnotes properly. I don't think there's a workaround for that—a literal tab character is ignored as simply whitespace.

The correct default behavior might be to insert a literal space between footnote reference and the body of the footnote. But this would change existing behavior, and would be even harder to work around.

So I propose a flag or other option to control whether nothing, a space, or a tab is inserted after the footnote reference.

Inserting spaces could be implemented as a filter, by prepending a space to each footnote. Would that work for tabs, too?

I confirm that Pandoc-produced footnotes now have a space between reference and text. Thanks! It looks like we were already setting the xml:space="preserve" attribute.

I plan to try implementing the alternative tab behavior as an option. I'll submit a pull request if I get there.