Unknown character

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    • #111359
      John Kelsall
      Member

      Hi everyone. Hope you can help me. I’ve imported a Word document into InDesign and at the start of some of the lines are multiple colons in blue that overlap the wording, at the start of each endnote, i.e. ::::::::::::

      If you copy one and paste it into Find/Replace the character is shown as ^l (letter el). Although it appears in the search field you cannot delete it by S&R.

      Could somebody tell me what this blue symbol represents and how it can be removed as the InDesign file is working very slowly and I’m presuming it is to do with these.

      Thanks in advance.

    • #111360

      Is there also a blue ^ below the line near the line of :::? If so, it could be index markers.
      Edit: the list of Find text at https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/indesign/using/find-change.html shows that ^l is the code for an index marker.

      Does the Word doc have an index? Does it need to be recreated in ID? If so, leave them in!

      Chris.

    • #111362
      Peter Kahrel
      Participant

      They are text anchors. They overlap the following text because they themselves have no width, whereas their screen representations do. You can check them by opening the Story editor (Edit > Edit in story editor).

      P.

    • #111363
      John Kelsall
      Member

      Thanks for your replies. There is no ^ under them so I do not think they are normal index markers. There is nothing showing in the Index palette. If they were text anchors I would expect them to be just ^ and I would be able to delete them in a S&R.

      To recap they are blue colons – there are no other symbols with them. In the book I’m working on they are in the endnotes, and each endnote has 13 of them looking like this ::::::::::::: – they overlap the start of the endnote wording. I wish I could send a screenshot.

      Cheers
      John

    • #111364
      John Kelsall
      Member

      Apologies Peter – I was confusing an anchored box with a text anchor. Is there a way of globally deleting these?

    • #111365
      Peter Kahrel
      Participant

      Unfortunately you can’t delete them globally because text anchors share their code (U+FEFF) with index markers, tags, endnote delimiters, and several other things. You could try and see what goes on with this script and selectively delete them:
      https://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/text_anchors.html
      Or you can open the story editor, where you can see them better, and delete them in there. Do make a copy of your document, because you may be deleting more than is good for you.

    • #111369
      John Kelsall
      Member

      Thank you Peter for all your help and advice. Thank you Chris too for your contribution.

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