5 Replies Latest reply: May 13, 2010 11:02 AM by [Jongware] RSS

    mystery hidden character causing line break issues

    mattaca Community Member

      We're having a bizarre problem and my research thus far has only yielded dead ends.

       

      One of our editors picks up text for a story from an existing InDesign document. She pastes the text into word. Sends the word file to the designer, who imports it, styles the text, and lays out the document. All is well. UNTIL...

       

      ...the document gets packaged and sent to someone as an .icap file. All of a sudden, hidden characters which caused no problem in InDesign turn into forced line breaks in InCopy and the text is completely thrown off (see attached: first one is InDesign with mystery characters highlighted, second is InCopy). You can see a couple other spots where it has happened, but I've highlighted the most obvious one.

      Picture 4.pngScreen shot 2010-05-12 at 5.29.48 PM.png

       

      Showing hidden characters doesn't give any clues as to what it is. Pasting the mystery character into the Find/Change dialogue box finds all spaces, so we assumed it's some kind of space character. But subsequent searches for a em space, en space, non-breaking space, punctuation space, and so on yield no results. And a GREP search for \x{20} does NOT find the character, so it's not a regular old space.

       

      Is there any way to figure out what the heck this thing is? Like a glyph unicode mapper? It's disturbing that InDesign and InCopy aren't lining up! As is, there isn't even a way to find/change these guys and I'm worried it might happen again.

       

      I've tested this on multiple computers running InCopy/InDesign 6.0.4. The result is the same. Any insight on the issue would be appreciated!

        • 1. Re: mystery hidden character causing line break issues
          P Spier CommunityMVP

          The highlight is obscuring the character. Can you post without the highlight?

           

          Is this always at the end of a paragraph? You might use a GREP Find/Change to just remove any whitespace at the end of a paragrap:

           

          find (.) +$ and change to $1

          • 2. Re: mystery hidden character causing line break issues
            [Jongware] Community Member
            Pasting the mystery character into the Find/Change dialogue box finds all spaces, so we assumed it's some kind of space character. But subsequent searches for a em space, en space, non-breaking space, punctuation space, and so on yield no results. And a GREP search for \x{20} does NOT find the character, so it's not a regular old space.

             

            Select just this character and look in the Info panel. This will tell you the exact code.

             

            (I'm betting it's the Unicode Line break Separator that suddenly is starting to make Guest Appearances: [OS X 10.6.3, ID CS5] Space: the final frontier)

            • 3. Re: mystery hidden character causing line break issues
              mattaca Community Member

              Peter, there is no symbol that is being obscured. It doesn't show anything, just blank space that can be highlighted, hence, the mystery.

               

              Jongware, it looks like you may be right. the info panel says the unicode is 0x2028. The weird thing is, I know these characters were not in the original file where the text was picked up. At what point did they get introduced? And why is InCopy not treating them the same way as InDesign? That's the most disturbing thing to me.

               

              For now, I'll add a find to my clean-up script for \{x2028} and replace it with \x{20}. But I still would love to know these mystery characters came to be. Thanks, Jongware.

              • 4. Re: mystery hidden character causing line break issues
                mattaca Community Member

                Oh, and to answer Peter's question, no, it's not always at the end of the paragraph, but does seem to always be at the end of a sentence. You can see in the second picture two other forced breaks, one after "system" and the other after "fat." In the first picture, you can see the lines are not breaking in those same places, and there is no hidden character indicating that anything is there.

                • 5. Re: mystery hidden character causing line break issues
                  [Jongware] Community Member
                  At what point did they get introduced?

                   

                  I can think of two possible scenario's, both equally possible:

                   

                  1. They are a part of a code in newer versions of Word (which does hide them from the user), and, since this is a "new feature" in Word documents, the InDesign engineers didn't know they should discard it when importing Word text; or

                   

                  2. They have always been in Word documents, but apparently, Adobe re-wrote the code ([CS4] Word Import severely broken) and it's suddenly a problem, where previous versions of InDesign handled them gracefully (as in, I've never seen these codes pre-CS4).