Brackets around entire contents of document

[Susan Carol]

I am uploading Word Docs into RoboHelp WebHelp and some of the links aren't working on a specific document. On carefully examining the document, I discovered that it has a grey bracket before the first word and after the last word.



Looking back at other documents that the conversion to html worked fine on, none have these brackets. What exactly do they signify and how do I get rid on them? I would really hate to have to re-create the document as it is full of tables of numbers.

Does anyone out here have any ideas? Thanks!!!!

Susan

[macropod]

From your description, that suggests someone selected the entire document and pressed Ctrl-F9 when they were trying to update cross-references and the like, instead of pressing just F9. The result would be an entire document encompassed in { }. Pressing F9 at this point is liable to make all the content disappear. If that happens, pressing Alt-F9 will expose the field contents.

Assuming the above is correct, the solution is to copy & cut everything between the field braces, leaving just the braces behind, deleting the braces, then pasting the cut content back into the document. You cannot simply select & delete the field braces.

[Susan Carol]

Thank you! I will try this!

[Susan Carol]

Your method did take the brackets away. Thanks. Didn't solve my whole problem, but that probably means the brackets weren't the problem. Still, I'm glad to know what caused them. Thank you.

[macropod]

Did you refresh the links after editing (& saving) the document?

[Susan Carol]

I finally got it to work. I tried everything and did exactly the same things to another document and it worked fine. I do think taking the brackets off helped, but may not have been the whole problem. I'm dealing with some macros and scripts that are black boxes. I hate black boxes. But it did work and I have documented the process carefully. So hopefully this strangeness will not happened again. It was a one-document problem, thank goodness. Now fixed, although I'm not entirely sure how.