Underscores showing up with endnotes converting from Word

Hello,

I am struggling to convert from a Word 2016 document to a pdf. I have many, many endnotes in my Word document. When I convert to pdf, there is a small underscore-like line in front of every single endnote superscript. Additionally, if I have the endnotes as hidden text in Word, these underscores show up for every hidden value as well (so, if I had the endnotes set as 1-2,3,4,5,6,7 and the "2,3,4,5,6," hidden in order to show only 1-7 in my text, my pdf shows up like _1-_ _ _ _ _ _ _7). I've attached a screen grab here as well. I'm using the "Create PDF" tool.

Is there a way around this? This doesn't happen when I re-reference the endnotes later on, only upon initial use. It's pretty unslightly. Thank you!