CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • September 26, 2010 at 8:54 pm #57133
    Josh Freeman

    Member

    Many times when I import a Word file, I see caret symbols in place of some of the spaces. Does anybody know what's going on here, and how to prevent it? Cleaning this junk up is time-consuming and annoying. I've posted a screenshot with these characters circled in green. Thanks for any help!

    

  • September 29, 2010 at 5:21 am #57160
    ShayR

    Member

    They look like non-breaking spaces to me.

    In InDesign, with invisibles switched on, type Command+Option+X (Ctrl+Alt+X on PC I would guess) and you’ll see what I mean.

  • September 29, 2010 at 6:25 am #57162
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    There's a list of hidden characters here

    https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_U…..-6f73.html

  • September 29, 2010 at 7:16 am #57163
    Gfx-Dzine

    Member

    Hi free associate

    I recently had the same thing non-breaking spaces showing up at as it seems random places. I didn't have time to investigate what the cause of it was, the document wasn't that long too so I fixed it (by 'manual' search and replace because sometimes it could be just erased but other times it had to be replaced by an actual space) and that was that.

    But now I saw your post (and some breathing room) I thought about it a bit more.

    The word-file that was given to me was created by someone who copied & pasted text from a webpage. I now had a look at the pagesource and where the non-breaking space in the word-file is there are metatags in the webpage (actually nbsp-s but also font weight changes (span style=”font-weight:normal) amongst others).

    Now I don't know what the route/source of the webpage text was but somehow those codes got converted to non-breaking spaces when pasted in word.

    Could it be that something similar is going on at your end?

  • September 29, 2010 at 9:34 am #57174
    Josh Freeman

    Member

    Thanks, all of you. I didn't realize that guide to invisible characters was available. That did it. Now I can see what's going on…though I don't know if your guess about copying and pasting from web pages is the cause. Might well be.

    A quick search and replace, and all is well!

• Author
  Posts