diff --git a/doc/arm/Makefile.in b/doc/arm/Makefile.in
index d1cdc81db8..e1f5b4e330 100644
--- a/doc/arm/Makefile.in
+++ b/doc/arm/Makefile.in
@@ -61,10 +61,16 @@ notes.pdf: notes-wrapper.xml ${NOTESXML} releaseinfo.xml pkgversion.xml notevers
 	${XSLTPROC} ${top_srcdir}/doc/xsl/pre-latex.xsl notes-wrapper.xml | \
 	${DBLATEX} -c notes.conf -Pdoc.layout="mainmatter" -o notes.pdf -
 
+# Produce notes.txt from notes.html using w3m, with some post-processing:
+#
+#  - remove trailing spaces from every line,
+#  - remove empty lines from the end of the document,
+#  - prevent GitLab issue/MR identifiers from being split across two lines.
 notes.txt: notes.html
 	${W3M} -dump -cols 75 -O ascii -T text/html < notes.html | \
 		sed 's/  *$$//' | \
-		sed -e :a -e '/^\n*$$/{$$d;N;};/\n$$/ba' > notes.txt
+		sed -e :a -e '/^\n*$$/{$$d;N;};/\n$$/ba' | \
+		sed '/ [!#]$$/{N;s| \([!#]\)\(\n\s*\)\([0-9][0-9]*\)|\2\1\3|;};' > notes.txt
 
 # use xmllint to process include
 Bv9ARM.html: Bv9ARM-book.xml ${NOTESXML} releaseinfo.xml pkgversion.xml noteversion.xml