Strange characters under Footnote references in pdf

[Scrolling]

When I save as/export to/print to PDF from Microsoft word, I see small characters underneath my footnote references (See attached). In a window zoomed to 100%, these show up like a second period at the end of my setence, but zooming in shows it to be text. The text is different under each superscript footnote reference, always a number and a letter. It is not in my word doc. Perhaps a setting? I've made sure track changes is off, and the box that says "convert comments" is unchecked. Any help would be appreciated! Thank you. 

[Abambo]

This looks like a font issue. How exactly do you create the PDF? Do the als apear when using Save As PDF?

[Scrolling]

It happens in every case: export to pdf, save as pdf, and print to pdf. 

[Chain83]

Just encountered a document with this issue. Seems it's likely these characters were added at some point when generating a PDF using Acrobat from Word. They are 1 pt and with the ZWAdobeF font. 

It is using them as some sort of reference it seems, but I have no idea why it would permanently add them to the document. That is very bad behaviour. Unfortunately this was in a messy document made by someone else, so I don't know how exactly it happened.

Easy to remove with find/change at least... 😕