mysterious boxes in text

[Joseph O'Brien]

When we open some of our Word documents on a PC, there are little
square boxes scattered throughout the text. These boxes can be copied
and pasted, but not pasted into a Find field so we can't do a Find &
Replace to get rid of them.

We create these documents on the Mac by copying and pasting from
various layout programs, like InDesign and Freehand.

Here are a few things I figured out on the Mac while trying to diagnose
this problem.

1) The boxes are not carriage returns.
2) They are also not spaces, or any other irregular character.
3) If I reveal hidden characters on Word (Option-8), the places where
the boxes show up on the PC are just spaces without a dot (all other
spaces have a light dot).
4) If I copy and paste this area into the Find box, it shows up as ^p.
However, when I do a Find & Replace, it does not replace these
mysterious spaces.
5) If I save the document as MS-DOS text with line breaks, the space
where the box would be is gone, and the words before and after it run
together.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what this is, and how to fix it? The
only way we can fix it currently is to manually go through each
document.

Thanks
Joseph

 

[Elliott Roper]

When we open some of our Word documents on a PC, there are little
square boxes scattered throughout the text. These boxes can be copied
and pasted, but not pasted into a Find field so we can't do a Find &
Replace to get rid of them.

We create these documents on the Mac by copying and pasting from
various layout programs, like InDesign and Freehand.

Here are a few things I figured out on the Mac while trying to diagnose
this problem.

1) The boxes are not carriage returns.
2) They are also not spaces, or any other irregular character.
3) If I reveal hidden characters on Word (Option-8), the places where
the boxes show up on the PC are just spaces without a dot (all other
spaces have a light dot).
4) If I copy and paste this area into the Find box, it shows up as ^p.
However, when I do a Find & Replace, it does not replace these
mysterious spaces.
5) If I save the document as MS-DOS text with line breaks, the space
where the box would be is gone, and the words before and after it run
together.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what this is, and how to fix it? The
only way we can fix it currently is to manually go through each
document.

That is the standard way Word shows the presence of a glyph it cannot
draw. Given the provenance, I'd lay odds on some typographer's space,
like a thin. I tried pasting a para containing a thin from InDesign to
Word 2004. Sure enough, it looks like a dotless space. But I can search
and replace for it after a copy and paste into the find/replace dialog.
In that dialog, it does a good impression of being a thin i.e, you
can't see it unless it is selected, and when selected looks like a
space only thinner.
What version of Word are you using on the Mac?

 

[Joseph O'Brien]

Thank you! That sounds exactly like what I'm dealing with. I'll sit
down with the graphic designer having these problems and try to figure
out just which character is giving us trouble.

Thanks again!
Joseph

 

[Elliott Roper]

Thank you! That sounds exactly like what I'm dealing with. I'll sit
down with the graphic designer having these problems and try to figure
out just which character is giving us trouble.

You should be able to do a find /replace all on them though. I'm
puzzled why this is not working for you. What version of Mac Word do
you have?