Trouble with MergeFormat tags appearing in Word doc

[Guest]

Hello! I have been living with this problem for ages, and just manually deleting them. But, I now have a new coworker who does not get the same problem when we single-source the same project to Word.

When I create a single-source Word document, before each topic heading in the newly generated Word doc, I get a tag like this: { XE "GPA:setting up" \MERGEFORMAT} I get one for each index entry for the topic. I do not generate an index when I generate printed docs. I'm trying to figure out where to get rid of these. It looks like a Word setting. My coworker and I have looked at all of our options in both Robo and Word, and can't seem to find which one made hers go away.

I use RH7 and Word 2003.

Any ideas? Thank you for your help in advance.

[Guest]

Sorry - I think I figured it out. I have to look at formatting (Show/Hide Formatting) when I use Word, she does not. I see now that the index entry tags don't print when you print the Word docs (so I don't need to delete them) - but they are ugly to look at as you are editing! Not sure if there is any other way to view all other formatting marks without those. As long as I don't have to delete them all anymore, and they don't appear in the printed docs, I'm happy.

Thanks anyway.

[Peter Grainge]

You could record a macro to Show / Hide Field Codes to turn this on and off as required.

[stewic]

I also had this issue. However, when I created a PDF from Word, it would also put all the MERGEFORMAT content in too.

The way to fix this (in Word 2016) is to go to File>Options. Under Display options, make sure you clear "Print hidden text" from the Printing options.