Word: involuntary replacement of letters with a space
m@rina Posted messages 27266 Registration date Status Modérateur Last intervention -
Hello,
I'm currently correcting a report (almost 200 pages, quite heavy) and I've just noticed that in several words, letters have been replaced by non-breaking spaces. The change tracking indicates that I am responsible for these replacements, but I did not do them intentionally. I have no idea how this happened.
Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be? Is it a compatibility issue? If so, what can be done?
Thank you for your help!
3 réponses
Hello,
I have the same issue, very annoying...
I'm also adding a related problem that seems linked: in my text, sometimes the word "France" or "Europe" is replaced (but not always in the right place, sometimes it replaces characters a few words later...) with "Spain" (very strange... I'm not Spanish, nor do I live in Spain)
My understanding of both problems is that Word is doing automatic character corrections (for example, replacing normal spaces before semicolons or colons with non-breaking spaces, or replacing English apostrophes with French ones; my Spain issue must be some other auto-correction - more obscure in this case), but for some reason, the change tracking is disrupting it, causing it to misalign, so that instead of replacing a normal space with a non-breaking space, it will instead replace a letter in the middle of a word with that non-breaking space.
Apparently, this is a bug in Word, and there's not much we can do except report it to Microsoft and wait for a fix in a future update... One potential solution: it seems to happen particularly in very long files, like those of novel reviewers or large reports)... so for my part, I'm going to split my large file into several sub-files. If that solves the problem, great; at least it will prevent unwanted changes throughout the large file, and it will allow me to better monitor this issue and possibly revert to earlier versions of the document just for the problematic sub-file...
If anyone has other suggestions, I'm all ears!
Thank you and good luck!
Hello
"my Spain story must be another auto-correction - more obscure this time), but for one reason or another the edit tracking is messing it up and it gets thrown off,..."
But... it's science fiction.
So, first of all, if it were a bug, we would know about it. I’ve been answering on Word forums for over twenty years, across all versions, and I’ve never seen this.
I can think of two reasons:
- Regarding non-breaking spaces, are you using a laptop with a mouse? Things like this can happen when the mouse and the touchpad conflict... So, if you're using a mouse, it’s better to disable the touchpad.
- As for Spain, as I said, it's science fiction. Word doesn't care about your nationality or where you live. To some extent, it might assume you're typing in Spanish because of certain Spanish-sounding words. So, you need to check the list of auto-corrections. And of course, pay close attention to when this happens.
m@rina
I'm adding another potentially interesting lead (especially to avoid file fragmentation): check the auto-correct or in-typing correction settings to disable the replacement of spaces before punctuation and others with non-breaking spaces (it's a shame, the feature is still practical...)
But strangely, I can't find a checkbox to enable or disable that (in File > Options > Proofing... I find plenty of options but not this one.)