Break character can't be deleted

[DesignStationYT]

Hello! Wondering if anyone has run into an issue like this one—there's an invisible break character in my document that I can't delete. I've even tried deleting chunks of the text that both precede and follow it to see if it can be removed as part of a large block rather than just on its own, but it just stubbornly stays. I also tried increasing and decreasing the number of columns in case it was somehow a bug related to that, but that didn't allow for the character to be selected or deleted either.

[thomaso]

I occasionally had run into a kind of endless series of End-of-Text symbols (§) which I could not delete – though they also did not do any harm if I just ignored them.

How did the text come into the frame? Typed? Or pasted from the pasteboard? If yes, from what application was it copied? Or did you place the text from a file; if yes, what file type?

For any investigation of this specific text frame it probably will be helpful if you upload your .afpub, and possibly an initial text file.

[DesignStationYT]

The content was copied and pasted in from a Word doc. It doesn't seem related, though, as I just ran a quick test to copy and paste the content into a new document and the character doesn't appear to originate from there. My biggest fear is that I'm going to have to start all over again—and it's an almost 100 page, 23,000 word document that I'm dealing with.

Unfortunately the document is confidential so I'm not really comfortable uploading into a public forum, but I'm attaching a video where you can see the ways I've attempted to delete the character that is causing the frame/column/page break. Also attaching a screenshot of the pasted result in a new Publisher file and a screenshot from the original Word file of the section where the character appears in the draft formatted version.

[Jon P]

If you'd like to upload the document here it will only be available internally and I can take a look.

Thanks

[DesignStationYT]

7 hours ago, Jon P said:

If you'd like to upload the document here it will only be available internally and I can take a look.

Thanks

Great! I've uploaded it. The page you're looking for is on page 16—though that may change depending on how the fonts render.

[Jon P]

I've not had any luck getting rid of it either, and can't reproduce it from scratch here so am intrigued as to where it came from. It does sound like pasting it in from Word could have been the cause, are you sure you can't reproduce it from scratch by pasting in the same text it originated from?

Either way I've logged it as it is for the developers to look into further.

Thanks

[DesignStationYT]

3 hours ago, Jon P said:

I've not had any luck getting rid of it either, and can't reproduce it from scratch here so am intrigued as to where it came from. It does sound like pasting it in from Word could have been the cause, are you sure you can't reproduce it from scratch by pasting in the same text it originated from?

Either way I've logged it as it is for the developers to look into further.

Thanks

Hi Jon — I really appreciate you digging into it! In the end, the only way around the issue that I could find was to create a new document, copy everything prior to the character, paste that into the new document, and then do the same with everything following the character. A bit of a kludge of a way to solve it, but at least I don't have to try and do battle with that character anymore. The interesting thing is that I had to re-download the Word file from my client after they made a few edits, and there is content in that space pasted into their Word file from a webpage now that may have been present and then removed prior to sending it to me. Perhaps that was somehow the issue? Some sort of HTML-related content? Anyway, I can upload the Word file to that Dropbox location if that in any way might help track down the issue (or perhaps not at all... maybe this is just a one-off bit of weirdness that no-one else will have to try to deal with!).

[Jon P]

Hi @DesignStationYT,

It may have been, but a developer has looked into this and highlighted how it's a character that has come from a table, and it shouldn't be possible to get into frame text. Were you copying and pasting from a table at any point? It will be worth looking at the doc file, but we think it's more likely there's a "recipe" in app that can get this character into a text frame that we need to find

[DesignStationYT]

Hi Jon — I don't recall copying anything out of a table and trying to insert that into frame text. What I did do was format content from the Word file and create a new table (which is off to the side in the version of the document I sent you) that I was going to move into place after getting rid of that character. The table itself was built by duplicating a different one from elsewhere in the document and then I typed in the content rather than copying/pasting from elsewhere. Anyway, I've uploaded the Word file (named Review Copy - Air North Domestic Tariff 2019 v4.0 Jul 15 2019 (no pictures) For Marketing.docx) so you can see if that helps shed any light on things. My thanks to you and the other developers for looking into this!

[Patrick Connor]

We believe the issue "Unable to delete column break character" has been fixed in 1.8.0 [Publisher beta is currently available if you care to check].