Replacing ¬

[PieOPah]

I have been scanning through a document and there are a large number of words which are broken up by a '¬' symbol.

eg could¬n't

For some reason, the spell check in word isn't picking these up. Also, when I try a replace, it never finds the character.

Is there another way I can replace all of these characters?

Kind Regards,

[HarryT]

It's probably a "soft hyphen" - ie a "marker" for the point at which a word can be hyphenated, if necessary. Can you not find it by doing a "copy" from the document itself?

[PieOPah]

Don't quite understand what you mean by finding it by doing a copy from the document itself. I have however looked in the 'special list' and found optional hyphen. This has detected the rogue character. Thank you - wouldn't have thought of looking for it there without the pointer to 'soft hyphen'. I thought a copy/paste of the character would be enough

[HarryT]

That's what I meant - doing a copy/paste from the actual text. Glad you've sorted it, anyway!

[DDHarriman]

Maybe are you doing a the OCR with Omnipage Pro?...

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by PieOPah

I have been scanning through a document and there are a large number of words which are broken up by a '¬' symbol.

eg could¬n't

For some reason, the spell check in word isn't picking these up. Also, when I try a replace, it never finds the character.

Those are generally Good Things that you want to keep; they allow the word to be broken if it falls at the end of a line. ("could¬n't" is a really bad one and should be avoided.) It generally means your Word settings have been set to "show invisible characters"--this can show all of them (soft hyphens, arrows for tabs, the ¶ symbol for ends of paragraphs, dots for spaces, and a few more) or it can be set to only show a few of them.

If there's a ¶ symbol on your toolbars, clicking it should make them go invisible. If not, under Tools-->Options-->View tab, the "Formatting marks" section shows which ones are set to be visible (when the "show all" button on the View toolbar is active).

If they're actual soft hypens, rather than the ¬ character (which you can get by holding the alt key and typing "0172" on the keyboard), they're formatting marks only, and they don't print or export, except as code, like paragraph marks or invisible table lines.