Non-breaking hyphens in Word disappearing in Publisher

[M Black]

When a Word file is placed in Publisher, all the non-breaking hyphens just disappear altogether.

[Old Bruce]

I see this when I use LibreOffice to Save As... a DOCX file, I don't have MS Word to test with. Here on Mac OS 11.7.4 I see no hyphen at all. In other words the Non Breaking Hyphen is not placed, nothing is placed in that bit of the text, not a plain hyphen, just nothing.

Copy paste works just not Placing a DOCX file.

[M Black]

That's how it it for me too. The words are just run together without spaces or hyphens or anything. I would have to replace all non-breaking hyphens with dollar signs or something in the doc file so that the dollar signs could be replaced once the file is in Publisher.

[MikeTO]

Same for me, non-breaking hyphens are not imported at all in 2.0.4 or 2.1 beta.

Here's a test file for Serif.

hyphens.docx

 

[laurent32]

They also disappear in macOS Pages…

I’m on Ipad right now.

Is this a system thing ?

[M Black]

That happened to me too on a Macbook Air.

I notice that in a Word document, when I put in an ordinary hyphen, it's black, but a non-breaking hyphen is thin blue. They both look the same (black) when printed to pdf though.

[pruus]

I tried it on a Macbook Air, version 2.04 Publisher, when place the .docx. I can see both. ze here:

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, pruus said:

I tried it on a Macbook Air, version 2.04 Publisher, when place the .docx. I can see both. ze here:

I do not see the non-breaking hyphen in your screenshot. I just see the two words run together.

[walt.farrell]

11 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Same for me, non-breaking hyphens are not imported at all in 2.0.4 or 2.1 beta.

Pasting from your file works in 2.1 beta on Windows. But Placing shows the same issue: the non-breaking hyphen disappears.

[MikeTO]

25 minutes ago, M Black said:

I notice that in a Word document, when I put in an ordinary hyphen, it's black, but a non-breaking hyphen is thin blue. They both look the same (black) when printed to pdf though.

That's because you have the Word version of Show Special Characters enabled. On the Home tab of the ribbon, click the Paragraph icon. After turning this off non-breaking hyphens will look exactly like normal hyphens. Word should really handle this better, it should show a normal hyphen with a blue symbol above it like other apps do to avoid confusion.

4 hours ago, laurent32 said:

They also disappear in macOS Pages…

Is this a system thing ?

Apple Pages does not support non-breaking hyphens and it's a bug in Pages that it's not converting them to regular hyphens when opening a Word file.

7 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Pasting from your file works in 2.1 beta on Windows. But Placing shows the same issue: the non-breaking hyphen disappears.

Thanks, it's good that it works with copy/paste at least but it does need to be fixed for placing.

Cheers

[M Black]

It works with Paste, as someone pointed out. Having used InDesign I would have expected to lose all the character styles when I paste, but they are all there. The non-breaking hyphens are also there. And they seem to be non-breaking.

But what really surprised me was the endnotes. I have another topic complaining that the endnote text in a placed Word file come in with the paragraph style Body AND Endnote Character Style, which makes them superscript throughout.

When the file is pasted rather than placed, the endnotes come in with paragraph style Body and character No Style for the standard text, but with all the applied character styles still there, and respected. The endnote numbers in the main text have the superscript character style for endnote number.

So this is the solution to the endnote problem. Now they need to make the Placed file do the same.

[MikeTO]

27 minutes ago, M Black said:

It works with Paste, as someone pointed out. Having used InDesign I would have expected to lose all the character styles when I paste, but they are all there. The non-breaking hyphens are also there. And they seem to be non-breaking.

But what really surprised me was the endnotes. I have another topic complaining that the endnote text in a placed Word file come in with the paragraph style Body AND Endnote Character Style, which makes them superscript throughout.

When the file is pasted rather than placed, the endnotes come in with paragraph style Body and character No Style for the standard text, but with all the applied character styles still there, and respected. The endnote numbers in the main text have the superscript character style for endnote number.

So this is the solution to the endnote problem. Now they need to make the Placed file do the same.

I believe the reason it works from the clipboard is that Word copies it in something like RTF format to the clipboard.

If you export a non-breaking hyphen from Word to RTF format then that file can be placed correctly into Publisher. So it works for RTF but not for DOCX.

Cheers

[DWright]

I have logged this issue with our developers.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Non breaking hyphen removed from place DOCX files" (REF: AFB-7353 ) has been fixed by the developers in internal build 2.1.0.1713
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us.