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Tom Pardy
MemberThanks David. Indeed it was the View>Grids & Guides>Smart Guides option. It only occurred to me to look in Preferences and I should have widened my vision.
MemberThank you, David.
I looked in the Get Info dialog box and it was indeed {2028}, the line or record separator (of course everybody knew that!) I put that into the GREP section of the Find/Replace dialog box, left the replace section blank and hit “replace all.” InDesign reported over 700 instances replaced! Imagine trying to do that manually!MemberThank you, Chris. Sorry about the delay in replying but I was working on something else.
Indeed, when I look in the Story Editor, the offending character shows up as a rectangle with diagonal lines forming an X cross. It is even shows some at the end of paragraphs which, because of where they are, I had not picked up in the normal view. However, when I copy that character, paste from the Story Editor into the Find/Change dialog box and click “Change All,” every text space in the entire document disappears. Thank goodness for Command-Z!
I have realised that the Word files are the results of OCR scans and I suspect the offending character may be an artefact of the scanning process. Even the best OCR software makes weird choices at times. Although InDesign doesn’t recognise it as a normal text space (and so give it a little blue dot) it does recognise it as a text space when it is placed in the Find/Change dialog box. Frustration!
But at least it is easier for me to pick them up visually in the Story Editor, even though it looks as though I still need to remove them one at a time. Heavy sigh!MemberWhilst layers apply to the entire document, a possible workaround would be to make the page for which you want an additional layer a separate document and then create an ID book which includes the separate document. You would need, of course, to make those pages that come before the additional layer page into another document within the book and again, the pages that follow it would be yet another document (or documents).
It would be fiddly, but it would achieve what you want (for whatever reason you may want it).
MemberThis, surely, is SPAM!
MemberThankyou, David.
It seems like it is possible (via MP4) but it becomes a case of “is it worth the troube?” and the answer in my case is “No.”
But thanks for pointing me to that article.
May 1, 2020 at 9:52 pm in reply to: Copying and keeping transparent object from Illustrator #1242783MemberWhy copy rather than place? I find that if I place an AI file into ID, the transparent background is intact.
MemberSorry 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”.
MemberThanks, 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.
MemberCertainly 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.
MemberYou are almost certainly right, David. I don’t always remember key combinations correctly — after all, mostly I grab them with muscle memory rather than consciously thinking about it — and it is highly likely that the Command key was involved along with the Shift key. But thank you for the hint about bulk use of the Clear Overrides button. I didn’t realise I could do it with (many) more than one style selected.
I did say it was a complex table and perhaps should also have mentioned that many of the cells have another table within them. That would make the bulk use of Clear Overrides just a tad more difficult.
MemberFile sent, David.
The matter is not important enough to justify my turning to a commercial recovery service. I am a retired pensioner.
MemberYes, they really are InDesign files. I know, because I wrote the originals.
Changing the extension to .txt allows access to the textual contents of the files (entirely unformatted, of course, and mixed with a certain amount of gibberish) but any graphic or design content is impossible.
MemberThank you, David.
Partial success. None of the files had a file extension (remember they were rare on Macs way back when) and when I added the file extension, I was able to open three of the seven dodgy files. Fortunately, from my point of view, those three files were probably the most important in terms of otherwise lost contents.
But the other four keep giving me a message: “Cannot open the file [name]. Adobe InDesign may not support the file format, a plug-in that supports the file may be missing, or the file may be open in another application.” Since I have not used ploug-ins and it is clearly not open in another application, it looks like these four may be lost causes.
Unless someone has another solution?
MemberHmmm…
I posted a reply, thanking you, David, but it has not appeared. Partial success as have now been able to open three of seven dodgy files.
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