What's this sign and how to remove it from my document?

Guessed · #1 07-21-2019, 04:16 PM

Converting to text only is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The bookmarks are not a particular problem you need to remove and certainly if there are any cross-references in the document, removing bookmarks could be causing lots of broken cross-references.

You can HIDE the bookmark indicator so they become invisible by going to Tools > Options > Advanced > Show Document Content > Show Bookmarks and unchecking the box.

You can delete all bookmarks by running a macro such as

Code:

Sub KillBookmarks()
  Do While ActiveDocument.Bookmarks.Count > 0
    ActiveDocument.Bookmarks(1).Delete
  Loop
End Sub

Lugh · #2 07-21-2019, 06:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Guessed

Converting to text only is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Agreed, we call it 'nuking' here

Your solutions are much better for one-off situations.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wordfinder

I didn't get understand what you mean of tag, would you please give more information about how to reserve the source formatting in my doc file after txt step?

This is just fyi, as Andrew's solutions above are much better for fixing one or two problems.

I deal with long documents—typically 25-100K words—which may have been thru a lot of different OSs and WP programs. After a frustrating year of trying to track down weird and wonderful problems, I developed a 'nuke and rebuild' process.

Essentially it's a bunch of Global Replace macros before and after the TXT step. So to preserve all italics:

Original doc:
Find all italic text;
Replace each instance with [startItalic]Found Text[EndItalic].

The square brackets' content are the 'tags' I mentioned, they can be anything you like as long as they are unique—ie won't match any legit content.

Code:

Sub IdentifyItalic()
'Surround Italic text with ItalicStart and ItalicEnd to identify it when formatting is stripped.
     Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
     Selection.Find.Font.Italic = True
     Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
     With Selection.Find
          .Text = ""
          .Replacement.Text = "ItalicStart^&ItalicEnd"
          .Forward = True
          .Wrap = wdFindContinue
          .Format = True
          .MatchCase = False
          .MatchWholeWord = False
          .MatchWildcards = False
          .MatchSoundsLike = False
          .MatchAllWordForms = False
     End With
     Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub

Post TXT Docx:
Find all the text tagged above, using Wildcards;
Make it Italic;
A later routine deletes all tags and changes direct formatting to styles.

Code:

Sub ItalicRestore()
'Restore Italics [blue for visibility disabled due to problem caused for BaseFix routine]
     Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
     Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
     With Selection.Find.Replacement.Font
          .Italic = True
'          .Color = wdColorBlue
     End With
     With Selection.Find
          .Text = "ItalicStart*ItalicEnd"
          .Replacement.Text = "^&"
          .Forward = True
          .Wrap = wdFindContinue
          .Format = True
          .MatchCase = False
          .MatchWholeWord = False
          .MatchAllWordForms = False
          .MatchSoundsLike = False
          .MatchWildcards = True
     End With
     Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub

This approach might be less useful if your original documents are in good shape. It suits me as my input docs can be a mess, so I need to take a hammer and paintbrush to them one way or the other.

Wordfinder · #3 07-22-2019, 01:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Guessed

Converting to text only is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The bookmarks are not a particular problem you need to remove and certainly if there are any cross-references in the document, removing bookmarks could be causing lots of broken cross-references.

You can HIDE the bookmark indicator so they become invisible by going to Tools > Options > Advanced > Show Document Content > Show Bookmarks and unchecking the box.

You can delete all bookmarks by running a macro such as

Code:

Sub KillBookmarks()
  Do While ActiveDocument.Bookmarks.Count > 0
    ActiveDocument.Bookmarks(1).Delete
  Loop
End Sub

Agree with you, and personally didn't like to delete the bookmarks. I need to import the .docx into a CAT Tool (translation software), so I guessed, it's better to remove those bookmarks and thought they would be some causes in the CAT Tool by their formatting tags or anything else.
Hide/Show is a good idea for hiding bookmarks while we need them, but we don't like they appear on my docs. Thank you!

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