Strange hidden characters

Question

Hello, hope someone can help me.I have to "clean up" an old document that was converted many years ago from QuarkXpress to Indesign.Multiple people have worked in it, also through Incopy and also copy pasted from Word. I see some "hidden Characters" (in all kinds of colours, see attached files) I want to get rid off... what are these???Thanks, creative greet, Yvonne

Robert at ID-Tasker · Accepted Answer

@yvonnev73142265

Those are non-printable XML tags representations.

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/indesign/using/tagging-content-xml.html

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James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

Do these characters show up in Preview mode, print or export to PDF? Or are they truly hidden characters?

I think the general answer is obvious: any file that's been traded around through various editing apps is going to accumulate some odd content. My first thought would be to do the "ID purge" on it: export to IDML, open that file, save under a new name as an INDD. That rewrites files at a structural level and often purges all kinds of glitchy code and excess content.

Anything else would almost certainly need selective Find/Replace to search for each 'wrong' character code and replace it with something null or simple.

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