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Inspiring
February 2, 2025
Question

Eliminating "bookmark" from exported/imported Google Doc?

  • February 2, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 676 views

I'm exporting a Google Doc to Word, then importing it.

There are bookmarks in the Google Doc, and appear as shown here. (The symbol that looks like a colon.) I'd like to eliminate them.

However, I can't do a find/replace for them... I can delete them individually, though.


Copying and pasting to Find doesn't show any results.

 

Any idea how to do this?

 

Thanks

2 replies

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
February 2, 2025

Most of the clone or alternate word processing apps are only Word-compatible in the loosest sense; you can move their files around to any app that opens and saves in Word format, but there are often significant differences in the actual document structure, markup, encoding etc. These faults often don't show up until you pass the doc to an app that expects full Word compliance, for translation, formatting, etc.

 

If you aren't using Word for these purposes, it's wise to pass the document through a genuine copy of Word (open-Save As to RTF, DOC and DOCX) to clean up and organize it as much as possible. One of the three Word formats, from a genuine copy of Word, will often import more cleanly and with fewer anomalies and glitches than from "Word export" from Docs, Pages, etc.

turner111Author
Inspiring
February 6, 2025

Thanks James. Just set up a new computer... being lazy about installing 🙂 

But will do so.

That said, the Google doc is what's exporting the bookmark (Tab) so I'm not sure how that will be interpreted by Word yet. I can remove the references in ID, but the symbol remains until I delete it.

Robert at ID-Tasker
Legend
February 2, 2025

This should work: 

 

app.activeDocument.bookmarks.everyItem().remove();

 

https://creativepro.com/how-to-install-scripts-in-indesign/

 

turner111Author
Inspiring
February 2, 2025

Thanks Robert!

Will try this out in a bit.

Robert at ID-Tasker
Legend
February 2, 2025

You're welcome