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• • May 15, 2018 at 11:47 am #103778
    Patti Moran

    Member

    This is something quite recent that I’ve never seen before, and rather bizarre.

    My editor gives me stories in MS Word. I copy and paste the story into InDesign. Suddenly, weird, unneeded random hyphens appear within the text…several in each story. They’ll be in the middle of words in the middle of a line – nowhere near the end of a line where you’d expect to find a hyphen. And there was no hyphen in that spot in the original Word text. There were TEN of them in the document I’m working on now, that spurred me to write this.

    This does NOT happen when I import text. However, I prefer copy/paste because it doesn’t bring in all the weird junk code that comes with importing directly from Word.

    Has anyone else seen this happen and more importantly, know how to make it stop?

    Thanks.

  • May 15, 2018 at 12:50 pm #103779
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    In general, it’s best if you use File > Place. But if you don’t like all the stuff it brings in, then turn on Show Import Options in the place dialog box, and then you can control what does and doesn’t get imported.

  • May 15, 2018 at 1:26 pm #103780
    Patti Moran

    Member

    I’ll try that … thanks for the suggestion!

  • May 15, 2018 at 3:00 pm #103781
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Those random hyphens are probably discretionary hyphens. Many times when you copy and paste from Word, the discretionary hyphens convert to hard hyphens.

    Either import the file, or if you want to copy and paste, search for discretionary hyphens and delete in Word first.

    Discretionary hyphens don’t show up in Word if you have invisibles turned off.

  • November 20, 2018 at 4:02 pm #111721
    Apostropher

    Participant

    This exact thing just happened to me! Never seen it before.

    They’re definitely not discretionary hyphens. I have Invisibles turned on in Word and everything looks completely regular. The words are all followed by a space (blue dot) and there are no special characters, but when pasted into InDesign, random hyphens suddenly appear.

    File > Place doesn’t work for me in this situation, as the Word doc’s text needs to go into multiple text boxes in the InDesign doc.

    That said, I just used File > Place to import the entire Word doc into a text frame in InDesign, then deleted it all, went back to Word, copied the one paragraph I needed and pasted it into InDesign and this time there were no hyphens, so maybe just doing that resolved the problem? Like, it reset the import variables or something? I’m updating the text in old InDesign docs, overwriting existing text with established paragraph styles, so maybe it’s some legacy issue that’s causing the problem?

    Anyway, something for me to keep an eye on!

  • November 20, 2018 at 4:22 pm #111722
    Apostropher

    Participant

    Nope. That wasn’t it. I went on to the next bit of text, pasted it into the next text frame and hyphens were back. Tried a few more times after undoing, changing paragraph styles, and cutting (not copying) from Word, and on the third paste the hyphens *weren’t* there. Really not sure what’s going on.

  • January 20, 2019 at 10:07 am #113766
    Ben Harris

    Member

    I refuse to import text. It’s not worth the hassle and added style sheet garbage.

    I get around this hyphen problem by selecting all in word, pasting all into a text edit document (set to plain text), then copy/pasting all into an INDD text box.

    Also, I use Plainclip.app extensively. It sits in your dock and unformats all clipboard text on click. https://www.bluem.net/en/projects/plain-clip/

  • January 23, 2019 at 4:27 am #113822
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    I’ve had this before when copy-pasting from Word.
    When I turned off hyphenation in the Word document first, and then copy-pasted, I didn’t get the superfluous hyphens.
    Microsoft being “helpful” I expect.

    Chris.

    Edit: just noticed this was on a new reply to an old-ish thread.

  • January 23, 2019 at 7:20 am #113825
    Patti Moran

    Member

    Ben Harris… I often do that when I’m having formatting problems too. It’s a good work-around, though a few more steps. When I’m building a newspaper, I’ll do that if I have to, but prefer only a direct copy-paste from Word to ID if possible.

    Chris… that’s a great idea… I’ll try it! I didn’t know you could turn off hyphenation in Word. Thanks! And no worries about the old thread. The problem is still plaguing me intermittently, so your reply is still very much relevant!

    Patti

  • January 23, 2019 at 7:32 am #113826
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Patti – great. It only took me about an hour the first time I encountered the problem!
    Turn Hyphenation off in Word (at least in my 2016 edition) is under the Tools menu .. Hyphenation .. Automatically hyphenate document.

    Chris.

  • January 23, 2019 at 7:40 am #113828
    Patti Moran

    Member

    Thanks for the tip, Chris!

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