Indesign broken endnotes <?>, how to remove them?

[Rautamarkus]

At some point on my book project (600 pages long) one chapter has managed to duplicate it's endnotes.  

All the other endnotes are running normally and I cannot find anything in the main text to cause this. Even if i remove every page from the document these duplicated broken references remain. There are <?> in place of numbers preceding every one of them.

Problems with them are:

1) I cannot delete them. Everytime i select them one by one or all, and try to delete them indesign crashes.

2) Exported pdf with the will become corrupted and cannot be opened.

How can I get rid of them?

[Rautamarkus]

Even if i select and copy (ctrl+c) a single whole line from those endnotes, that causes indesign to crash.

[Rautamarkus]

It seems I can delete all the content inside the open and close half-brackets, but the brackets are non-destructible and cause a crash when tried to eliminate.

[Laubender]

@Rautamarkus said: "How can I get rid of them?"

Hard to tell without looking into the document.

What you can try: Export the document to IDML, open the IDML file as document and save to a new name.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[EvangelicalCatholic]

I had the same issue as the OP and this solution worked for me thankfully!

[Rautamarkus]

Bypassed the problem by moving all the pages chapter by chapter to a new document.
Still quite nervewrecking that such ghost-artefacts are able to brick the whole document.