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• • February 11, 2017 at 8:04 am #92134
    Ann Farr

    Member

    This never used to happen until about 5 books ago. These are fairly academic books with lots of pp.122-132 and 1914-1918 etc. When I import these Word documents into ID CS6, lo and behold most of the hyphens are missing (not that I noticed at first). Then I examine the Word doc and think that if I Search and Replace these hyphens with an n dash or @£$ or something, I can sort it out in InDesign. So I copy the hyphen in the Word doc and paste it into Search — it’s a blank space! I mean, what the heck?

    The strange thing is that if I Copy (in the Word doc) and Paste into InD, all the hyphens appear as normal.

    I’ve googled this problem and read that this can happen with old versions of Word and that MS issued an update — but that’s not really helpful.

    Has anyone else met this? Any solutions? Thank you for your time.

  • February 11, 2017 at 10:47 am #92143
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I have heard of weirdness like this… sometimes a solution is as simple as re-saving as docx from Word (instead of .doc)… or vice versa!

  • February 11, 2017 at 11:09 am #92144
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    That’s weird that you can’t even search for the hyphens in Word.

    I’ve had that happen a few times, and it was because the author/typist used a different font (usually Symbol) for the hyphens. Why, I had no idea, but that’s what it was.

  • February 11, 2017 at 11:21 am #92145
    Ann Farr

    Member

    D’you know what it was? On the Google InDesign group I was advised by a couple of people that perhaps I should search for alternative hyphens. It turns out, in the latest book docs, that every single one of the ‘missing’ hyphens was a nonbreaking hyphen and that it’s known in Word version 7 although MS apparently issued a patch for it. Isn’t that amazing?! Oh I’m so grateful to these groups.

    • February 11, 2017 at 3:03 pm #92146
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Ann–one of my first thoughts was discretionary hyphens or non-breaking, but I think they look different and not like regular hyphens (at least the discretionary hyphens look different). But that’s in the current versions of Word.

      I’m glad you got it figured out.

  • February 14, 2017 at 9:49 am #92178
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    Wow. So copying and pasting the Word doc brought them into ID as non-breaking hyphens? But placing the Word doc deleted them? (“Pages 122126”?) Or did it replace them with a space? Did it look different in Story Editor?

    When you searched for a non-breaking hyphen, did you search in Word or in ID?

    AM

  • February 14, 2017 at 10:38 am #92182
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Try saving the Word Files from .docx to .doc or vice-versa, then import it again in InDesign. I hope it will work.

  • February 15, 2017 at 2:57 am #92212
    Ann Farr

    Member

    Hi Anne-Marie. Copying and pasting the Word doc into ID brought those hyphens in as ordinary hyphens (don’t understand why but at least I was able to get on with the layout!). Placing the Word doc deleted them. After a couple of lovely people on the InD google group replied (within minutes) with suggestions, I opened the Word doc and hunted in the Advanced Find and Replace > Special and found nonbreaking hyphens (amongst other sorts of hyphen). This gave me ‘^~’ (without quote marks) which I copied and pasted into the Search field of the doc, asked Word to highlight them all which it did, and actually replaced them with an n dash.

    Regarding the earlier four books (which were so long and tedious that I hadn’t noticed the missing hyphens), the import into ID missed out hyphens between words as well as numbers, so I’ll just have to pay attention to Word documents a bit more, although the publisher sends files fairly frequently and there’s little time for refinement!

    I had already tried saving the Word files as .docx but that made no difference at all. There are several places on the web that describe Word version 7 as having this problem (on import into ID although I’ve stopped at CS6 and the CC versions may, of course, be able to cope) and that MS had, at some time, issued a patch — but I’m not convinced that all five authors use v7 and they certainly don’t understand what I mean about the patch! Sigh!

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