Random hyphens appearing in text pasted from Word

[Stephen_Lording]

I've just started noticing random hyphens appearing in text I'm pasting from Word into InDesign. I'm pasting into a series of InDesign docs in a journal that get updated every year, and I've never had this happen before. I just pasted in a 900-word story, for example, and there are 12 hyphens inserted into seemingly random words with no pattern I can detect.

Hyphenation is turned off in both Word and the InDesign paragraph style, so there should be no hyphens.

They’re definitely not discretionary hyphens. I have Invisibles turned on in both Word and InDesign and everything looks completely regular. The words are all followed by a space (blue dot) and there are no special characters.

The screenshot I've attached shows the text in InDesign with the source text in Word below.

Anyone else seen this?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Select one of the "bad" hyphens as your search glyph and replace them with nothing. This will work even if the actual glyph is not a standard hyphen.

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[Joanne21807957mxp2]

Hi and thank you for your response! That’s exactly what I did for my initial search.. I too figured it might be a unique “version” of a hyphen, so that’s why I highlighted it and placed it into the find query. Sadly, it did not work -- none of them pulled up in the results of the query. Very odd.

Get Outlook for iOS<>

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Eh. Rats. That usually works for these. (Besides hyphens like these, I had a mangled import that had about ten crypto-formatting variations I could only remove using this method.)

Word imports can drive you crazy. Good luck on finding a key for this one.

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[Roope Koski]

Cause and a solution 2023: For me the hyphens appear in places where they would be if hyphenation would be on in Word.  Applies to both cut and copy.  Since I cut short snippets from a Word table, I made the columns so wide that they rarely wrap, which solved the problem.  I assume making the font size very small in Word would also help.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Soft or discretionary hyphens should not be in most text. Automatic hyphenation does not rely on them being there; it sounds as if some part of the doc creation or editing process inserted discretionary hyphens for hyphenation assistance or override, and ID is importing them as visible characters.

Possibly a search and replace, exchanging all discretionary hyphens for "nothing," might end the problem. I don't have the text code for discretionary hyphens at hand but you should be able to look it up and validate this with a quick search. (THEN do the search-replace.)

[bodaboda123]

Hi, I know this is an old thread but the problem is still happening with my 2022 versions of Indesign and Word. What worked for me is this: I noticed that my Word file had hyphenation turned ON. (Although the hyphens that were being added in Indesign were not the same as the end-of-line hyphenated words in Word.) So I turned OFF hyphenation in the Word file and after that, when copying and pasting from Word to Indesign, the problem did not present itself again.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

That aligns with my notion that newer versions of Word have more than one undocumented change — in this case, actually placing discretionary hyphens for "faster" use (in the web/cloud version?) that are picked up in cut and paste.

Bit of a WAG, but noting that turning hyphenation off eliminates the problem seems to confirm it, and is a useful point — thanks!

[Michelle243482146jck · Accepted solution]

I have had the same issue. Hyphenation is turned OFF. Hyphens appear in InDesign whether copy OR paste is used.  I discovered that the paragraph style has a sneaky little checkbox that, when I selected it, the issue stopped happening.

Make sure the paragraph style in Word has paragraph formatting set to "do not hyphenate." 

Mac:

Modify style > Format Paragrpah > Line and Paragraph Breaks > FOrmatting Exceptions: check "Don't hyphenate"

  

I hope this helps!

[ethanb38241811]

This worked for me, thank you!