What is a text symbol, what does it do (other than mess with my doc)?

To clarify, text symbols are one of FrameMaker's visual guides that can be optionally displayed in a FrameMaker document window to indicate the location of something else. A text symbol appears as a special character, but never prints or appears in PDF. However, the represented object may indeed affect the way the published document appears. As explained in the FM 9 User Guide, there are text symbols for an end of paragraph, end of flow, tab, anchored frame, table anchor, marker, forced return, equation alignment point, nonbreaking space, discretionary hyphen, and suppress hyphenation. You turn text symbols on and off with the View > Text Symbols command. Doing so does not affect the content of your document; it just helps you locate where the represented objects occur.

Thus, the problem you are having is not text symbols per se, but the object represented by a text symbol. As others have commented, the tab character can produce the observed results. Viewing text symbols can help you locate the tab characters. While tab characters can be inserted automatically in an autonumber or, in a structured document, in a prefix or suffix, they can also be entered from the keyboard, by pasting, or by converting a document that contains them from another format. You can find tabs that are not automatic using Edit > Find/Change. Type \t as the text you want to find. If you wish you can do a global change to remove all the tabs in the document or change them all to spaces.

          --Lynne

Text symbols show up in your PDFs? That's ummmm ... very unusual, they definitely shouldn't show up in output files, PDFs or help projects.

Can you give an example of one, maybe post a small screen capture from a PDF (I believe the camera icon in the forum still works to paste in a screenshot).

Text symbols are used in a lot of apps, e.g. word processors, too, to show an end of paragraph or a line break, tabs, or other essential formatting information.

In FM's case, they show where markers are inserted, where tables or graphics are anchored, or where tabs are located, and so on. You can't get rid of FM's text symbols except if you were deleting the feature, e.g. if you delete a table then its text symbol is also deleted. Even so, there are =always= symbols in an FM doc, even a completely empty document would have the end-of-flow symbol (which is this: § )

Do you create your content directly by typing in FM, or do you import from other apps, e.g. from Word?

There are often extra symbols after importing from another app because the import filter creates "erroneous" symbols when it doesn't know how to handle some formatting from the other application. Even so, they shouldn't show up in PDF or help output.

Sheila

In FrameMaker, the term text symbol refers to characters that take up space in the document but do NOT print. These characters include the end-of-paragraph symbol, the space, the tab, nonbreaking space, nonbreaking hyphen, manual line break, etc. Showing them in FrameMaker is a matter of taste and work style. Whether you show them in FrameMaker or not, they do not print.

If you are seeing them in a PDF, then they may have been entered as the characters that are used to display the text symbols on screen. For example, the end of a paragraph is displayed on screen with the pilcrow sign ¶.