Hello, all, and thank you in advance for your help.



I am creating a document that is locked except for a couple of words that I will allow the user to modify before printing or saving. I am doing this by using the Restrict Editing feature, highlighting the word I want the user to edit, and choosing No Changes as my editing restriction with the Everyone exception for the word in question. All of the non-editable text doesn't have the Everyone exception.

When you use this method, the word(s) that you are allowing the user to edit appear within square brackets ( "[" ), which is fine as I want to highlight these words anyway. At first, I thought these were just an innocent marker of the editable text.

My problem comes when user print or save the documents as PDFs. When this is done, the editable words appear bracketed by vertical lines (kind of like just the vertical parts of the lines of the square brackets). It looks like this: " |cake| " ... which is stupid.

How can I avoid this unwanted visual clutter?

Thanks,

Nikko

Version of Word?
Method of producing pdf?

Using Word 2013 and File > Save As > pdf I did not see this. I used both a content control and text marked as editable by everyone. I see the brackets in the screen display but none in the pdf nor in print preview.

Word 2016 on Windows 7. I am using the Save as PDF function in Word.

Remember that the lines are also visible in a straight print of the Word doc as well.

Huh, something new to Word 2016 then maybe?

This should be easily reproducible as I have many colleagues complaining of it.

Any brilliant minds out there with a solution?

Figured it out! Whew! Only took hours of searching and experimenting.

It seems there is a bug in Word 2016/Office 365 (may affect other versions): if you have both bookmarks AND you restrict editing except for certain text areas as described above, then you will see the vertical lines I describe. Remove the bookmarks and the lines go away. Fortunately, I don't need those bookmarks. Others may not be so lucky, and will have to use form fields and lock the document for forms. (Which is what I would have done from the start except I inherited these docs from someone else. I'll redo them at some point in the future when time permits.)

An alternative to bookmarks and ref fields may be mapped content controls and or StyleRef Fields. Neither require bookmarks to replicate content.

Repeating Data Using Document Properties Content Controls and Other Mapped Content Controls

I would recommend that you report this problem to developers.

1. Use the Smiley face in Word to send a frown to developers.
2. UserVoice Word for Windows