hidden special characters

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alan Smithee Jr.
  • Start date Start date
A

Alan Smithee Jr.

­­there is a hidden special charater the look somewhat like a hyphen but
perhaps more like the litter "L' rotated to the left and then flip upside
down. A straight line with another short vertical line going down from the
right end. What is this character? What does it do?
 
and...searching for this character in the document doesn't work. cut/pasting
into the search dialogue yeilds no results even though I have a document
with many of these characters.

btw...this document was produced by scanning text and they seem to be hypens
of breaking syllables in words at the right side of the page

­­
 
Thanks for the reply, Greg. No...nothing like it in that web page.

What's rather annoying is that I can search/find it or search/replace it
with nothing to delete them all in one go.
 
E-mail it to me and I will try to find out what it is. No macros please.

cut the CAPS from the address below.
(e-mail address removed)
 
Got your file.

They are optional hyphens.

Edit>Replace>More>Special.

Click on the optional hyphen symbol ^- to insert it in the find what field.
 
It's an "optional hyphen". If a word is close to the end of a line, that
hyphenation point will be used. Otherwise, optional hyphens are hidden and
don't show up when the document is printed.
 
If you didn't find it on that page, you weren't looking hard enough. From
the article: "A conditional hyphen (one that is printed only if it falls at
a line break, entered with Ctrl+Hyphen) is shown as ¬."

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Still seems odd, thought, that selecting...copying...pasting that character
into Search Dialogue doesn't produce any found characters.
 
Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:13:30 -0800 from Alan Smithee Jr.
­­there is a hidden special charater the look somewhat like a hyphen but
perhaps more like the litter "L' rotated to the left and then flip upside
down. A straight line with another short vertical line going down from the
right end. What is this character? What does it do?

It sounds like the logical "not". I don't know what you mean by
"hidden"; it's Alt+0172.
 
You have to search for ^-. That's the code for "Optional Hyphen," as found
in the Special menu in the Find dialog.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Back
Top