Turn off comparing special characters?

[Melanie Strom]

I have two documents--one has no special characters such as nonbreaking
spaces and nonbreaking hyphens. Also, one has all straight quotes. The
other has no special characters or straight quotes.

When I do a Compare and Merge, where there are nonbreaking spaces in one
document and not the other, it shows up as a change. The quote marks are
also shown as changes.

Is there a way to keep Word from comparing things like this? The quote
marks I can understand, but a space is a space in my book. Is this just the
way Word looks at things? Is it looking at a nonbreaking space as a
different character as a space?

 

[grammatim]

It is indeed a different character. You could even learn the Unicode
numbers of the two characters by selecting an example and pressing Alt-
X -- you'll get different results for regular and non-breaking spaces.