Screenshot.jpg
in the attached sample paragraph text is supposed to be justified excepting a first-line indent. highlighted in three places is a barely visible dot that is apparently enforcing some formatting (the image is from print-layout view). in all other viewing modes the text displays correctly. I have been unable to figure out what these are, how they came to be, or how to get rid of them. appreciate any suggestions.

WORD 2016

Win10 64

They look like floating objects that can be removed by selecting the object border and pressing Delete.

An easy way to select all three at once is to go to the Home tab and look at the right hand end of that ribbon to Select > Select Objects and then lasso (Click and drag over all three shapes) before pressing the Delete key.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

that worked. thanks very much. any thoughts on what happens to make these artifacts appear?

Those objects don't randomly appear by themselves - someone must have put them there.

Without looking at the document itself I can only make wild guesses. Even looking at the file it would still only be a guess because I don't know the history of that content. Perhaps they were pasted in from another source (eg with text from a web page). Perhaps they were remnants of floating objects such as drop caps or page number entries which had been added at some stage by someone.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

something I did for sure--doc was generated from scratch--my question was poorly worded. thanks for your thoughts.