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Hidden characters coming in from Word

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    • #1177757
      Tom Pardy
      Member

      Regularly I place a Word document of a particular design into an InDesign document. The particular Word design (I have many of them) ends with the final paragraph being a source attribution line that begins with an em-dash, a space and then the details of the source. Nothing else.

      However, when it comes into InDesign, there are three hidden characters before the em-dash. In the Story Editor window they are identical and each one looks like a target bullseye surrounded by square brackets. I know from the InDesign Secrets <i>ids_specialchars.pdf</i> that was issued a few years ago that such a sign could indicate a text anchor or it could be cross-reference destination. Since I am the author of the various Word documents, I can promise that there is no text anchor and no cross-reference in any of them.

      Why do these three symbols keep occurring each time I place one of these Word documents? How can I stop it happening? At the moment my only solution is to go into the Story Editor and delete them. But I shouldn’t have to.

      Not a big issue, of course, but one that constantly frustrates me.

    • #14324383
      David Blatner
      Keymaster
    • #14324288
      Tom Pardy
      Member

      Certainly the symbol that shows in the Story Editor is the same (I suspect it is a generic symbol that covers “anything else for which we don’t have a symbol”) but the Word files I have been placing are all .doc files, not .docx, so the solution suggested in the article has already happened and hasn’t worked.

    • #14324287
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Well, the symbol is probably a bookmark or index marker or something. Or perhaps they are text anchors?

      I wonder if you ran this script in InDesign what you’d find: https://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/text_anchors.html

    • #14324285
      Tom Pardy
      Member

      Thanks, David.

      I haven’t tried the script as, being the author of the Word (.doc) documents, I am confident they don’t contain text anchors. The whole thing is becoming too big a mystery for me to bother with it when it is relatively easy for me to delete the offending symbols when they occur.

      But thanks for the suggestions you have offered.

    • #14324305
      Design Dept
      Participant

      What happens if you paste all the text into TextEdit (or PC equivalent) first, then copy/paste from there into InDesign?

    • #14324234
      Tom Pardy
      Member

      Sorry for the delay in replying but have been busy on other things.

      Thanks for the suggestion but not really practicable. TextEdit changes soft returns to hard returns and it takes longer to correct that than simply to delete the unwanted “anchors”.

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