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• • May 19, 2012 at 12:18 am #62205
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    I am using InDesign CS5.5 and have come across a hidden character I do not know. It does not appear to affect the behaviour of the text in any way that I can detect, but I am intrigued as to its meaning.

    I have searched in vain through the InDesign Secrets Guide to Special Characters .pdf and also through the indesign_cs5_help .pdf; neither of them seems to even know it exists.

    I have shown only the first word of the paragraph. The paragraph style is aligned right and the first two characters (from my point of view) are an en-dash and a normal space. If I delete those two characters, the two rows of three blue dots (the hidden character in question) overlap the “C” of “Collected. Any suggestions?

    

  • May 19, 2012 at 6:13 am #62206
    Bala S

    Participant

    Dear Furry,

    It may be Bookmark character or related to xml tag markup. Just edit in story editor, then you can find out what character it is?

    regards,

    Bala. S

  • May 19, 2012 at 7:25 am #62207
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    Thank you, Bala, for your reply. It doesn’t (yet) answer the question, but it may give a clue to someone else who can move me closer to an answer.

    When I go into the story editor, I get this:

    

    I don’t know what those three symbols represent and am intrigued that there are three of them, particularly as this seems to be the case in every instance where this hidden character (or characters) shows up. I have also noticed that, in every instance, it is at the beginning of a paragraph that has the same paragraph style, “Reference”. I have gone through the paragraph style details but can see nothing that arouses my suspicion.

    Any more suggestions?

  • May 19, 2012 at 10:17 am #62208
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Bookmark or index markers?

    The single raised dot gets used by ID to indicate a variety of things otherwise invisible — I must admit I was racking my brain about seeing three of them in a row!

  • May 19, 2012 at 10:18 pm #62209
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    Hmmm…

    If Jongware doesn’t know, who on earth does? :) The Blatman perhaps?

    I am the author of the document in question and nobody else has worked on it, although I first created it over two years ago and have updated it frequently as circumstances have demanded. However, I have put in no bookmarks ever and no index markers ever. The document is not long enough to warrant either, being less than 20 pages A5.

    The mystery deepens.

  • May 21, 2012 at 6:08 am #62218
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Greater forces than you or me may be at work. Cosmic rays, perhaps. ;)

    Sometimes “weirdness” creeps in to documents. Have you tried exporting to IDML and opening that? Maybe it'll go away. Or export that story to InDesign Tagged Text and reimport it…? Does it remain if you select all, copy, and paste into another frame? In other words, I'm wondering if it's something abnormal, rather than something you'd normally see in InDesign.

  • May 21, 2012 at 5:49 pm #62230
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    “Weirdness” does seem an appropriate word here! :)

    Here is the result of further research: (1) Exported to IDML and opened that — strange hidden character/s remain. (2) Exported to InD Tagged Text and reimported — strange hidden character/s gone. (3) Select all, copy and paste into another frame — strange hidden character/s remain. Does any of that tell anyone anything?

    Let me make it clear that I do not see this as a problem, simply as an intriguing mystery. I just want to know what these hidden characters are. They have not caused me any problem thus far and the document prints without any difficulty. But when a “feature” does not seem to be documented anywhere, my curiosity is aroused.

    I’m not sure if this is relevant information or not, but every instance of this (these?) character’s appearance is in material that has been placed into the InDesign document from a Word file (.doc). I have opened each of the Word documents and can see nothing unusual there.

  • May 21, 2012 at 8:44 pm #62231
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I don't know… very weird, certainly. Glad it's not upsetting you.

    Here's a fun trick: Select one of the characters, then right-click and choose Load in Find from the context-menu. Does any unicode character show up in the Glyphs tab of the Find Change dialog box?

    Clearly some kind of odd “control character” is sneaking in.

  • May 21, 2012 at 11:32 pm #62232
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    It gets even weirder!

    The Find/Change dialog box on the Glyph tag tells me the character has the unicode value of 0020 and, when I look that up on a unicode table, it is simply a space. To check this, I selected an “ordinary” space in the text and did the same right-click, Load in Find, routine and it, too, gave a unicode value of 0020.

    Yet the characters that are intriguing me, as seen in my second screen shot above (message 3), has a peculiar graphic representation in the story editor whereas an “ordinary” space appears simply as one single blue dot.

    I do love a good mystery but this one seems to have a desperate need for Columbo or (for British readers) Miss Marple or Poirot!

  • May 22, 2012 at 5:02 am #62233
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Yes, it does make one work the little gray cells! ;)

    I honestly don't know what could be causing that. I choose to blame Word or the Word import filter, because it's convenient to blame those in mysteries like this.

  • May 22, 2012 at 7:02 am #62239
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    I’m all in favour of blaming Word. It is one of my pet targets for blame. I wish there was some other word processor I could use but, unfortunately, so many people send me Word documents (both .doc and .docx) that I would still have to have it hanging around. And I am not rich enough to afford TWO word processing programs.

    So let’s blame Word and move on. This is the longest thread I have ever achieved! :D

  • May 24, 2012 at 2:29 pm #62269
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Could you email the IDML (zipped) to cpr@emsoftware.com? I'm curious enough to want to see the details.

  • May 25, 2012 at 8:18 pm #62281
    atwfg828

    Participant

    I think I may have solved the mystery. It is underlined spaces with a base line shift to put it in the position of a dash. Creative thinking, but more work than the keyboard shortcut for the m or n dash.

  • May 27, 2012 at 5:43 am #62286
    Boaz Eilat

    Participant

    Hi Furry,

    I get these weird hidden characters in text imported from Word files. They are text anchor hyperlink destinations.

    In some rare cases they caused me problems, especially when they were located after a tab character. They made the word coming after the tab character to “glue” to the word before the tab. But that behaviour is not consistent!

    Since I usually do not need any hyperlink destinations in these documents I delete all the hyperlink destinations (Hyperlinks panel> Hyperlink Destination Options>Delete All). Of course you can delete them one by one, manually or via the panel.

  • May 27, 2012 at 6:44 am #62287
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    BoazE is, I believe, correct! These are hyperlink destination characters. See page 4 of the special characters PDF that you mentioned:

    https://creativepro.com/downloads/ids_specialchars.pdf

    I'm embarrassed to admit that I was fooled by a Safari bug. For some reason, attached images don't expand properly for me in in this forum when I click on them. So I was gauging your screen shots by squinting at the tiny thumbnails. Silly me. When I switched to Chrome, I could click to expand them.

    You can make your own hyperlink destinations by clicking in text and choosing New Hyperlink Destination from the hyperlinks panel menu. Make a text anchor destination and you'll see that it shows up the same as this. Yes?

  • May 27, 2012 at 7:55 pm #62288
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    Wow! When I posted on 22nd May I thought this thread was done. Turn you back for five minutes and so many more posts appear!

    Thank you for your offer, Chris. Since the document included some sensitive material, I had planned to replace the non-affected text with lorem ipsum before exporting an IDML file to send you but, in view of the posts by BoazE and David, that seems a little irrelevant now. If you would still like an IDML file, let me know and I will still do it.

    Yes, BoazE and David, you do seem to have cracked it, though I am intrigued by your inability to expand the pictures in Safari, David. That is my browser of choice and they expand fine for me.

    But one little mystery remains: how on earth did the hyperlink destinations get in there in the first place?

    The Word files that have been placed in my InDesign document are all straight-forward text files with no hyperlinks and no hyperlink destinations in them. They have paragraph styles but very few of them, mostly just “Body” and “Reference”. The hyperlink destinations have only ever appeared (in InDesign) at the beginning of the “Reference” paragraph at the end of each Word file import and perhaps it is of significance that each of these “Reference” paragraphs is aligned to the right and begins with an em-dash?

    I just tried importing one of the offending Word files into another InDesign document and the hyperlink destinations appeared as before. Yet there is nothing in the Word file to indicate that it is anything other than formatted text. Weird!

    As I said before, this is not a PROBLEM for me as it hasn’t caused any production difficulties. It just an intriguing mystery.

  • May 28, 2012 at 3:53 am #62289
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Word creates lots of links internally, and all by itself as well. Perhaps these are not hyperlinks per sé, but rather bookmarks (these look the same).

    I've found that ID has loads of problems with Word's links, such as totally crashing on you when you try to export an e-pub. If you still have a version of your file with those characters in it, you could try for yourself if it does.

  • June 11, 2012 at 8:32 am #62389
    Rudolf Warttmann

    Member

    Hi Furry,

    which Unicode value is indicated in the “Information” panel when you select this special character?

    Rudi

    

    ---

  • June 11, 2012 at 5:54 pm #62390
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    Heya Rudi,

    Preceding the word “Collected” are (from left to right) three characters whose Unicode value is FEFF, then an en-dash, then a normal space.

    As David Blatner has already determined, those three characters are hyperlink destination characters. Why they are there and why there should be three of them is a mystery known only to Microsoft Word. There are about five instances in this one InDesign document where I have placed a Word document and, in each case, the final paragraph of the Word document, which is a reference to indicate the origin of the original material quoted, has come into InDesign with these three characters at the beginning of the paragraph.

    Since I also wrote the Word documents, I have no idea why Word has added hyperlink destination characters as the document in each case is just formatted text. And why three of them? I have been using Word for maybe 23-24 years and have yet to know what goes on in the mind of the Redmont folks. Weird!

    Mind you, I don’t know what goes on in Adobe’s mind either!

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