Removing soft hyphen

[Beaver110]

Hi
I’ve been having an issue regarding soft hyphen. I have a long document file that contains many soft hyphens. I can manually select and delete, but it takes a lot of time. I try to use “Replace & Find” but somehow soft hyphen (\x00AD) doesn’t show up on the search box. I had tried copying a word with a soft hyphen into the search box but it doesn’t show up anyway. How can I remove them?

P.S. I can hide soft hyphens on “Display formatting” sections, but that’s not what I need.

Problem solved by gabix:

1. Open Find & Replace
2. Paste \u00AD in the search field.
3. Make sure “Regular expressions” is on.
4. Press “Replace All”.

[ajlittoz]

Soft hyphen are not real characters, that’s why you can’t copy-n-paste them in the search box of Find & Replace. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to specify some keyword using regular expression to match them.

A solution could be to look at the underlying XML and remove them from there using a text editor.

[gabix]

Soft hyphen are not real characters

Nonsense. They are real characters and can be searched and replaced unless they are inserted automatically as enabled in the paragraph (style) properties, see the Text flow tab.

[mikekaganski]

\u00AD is the regex code for the soft hyphen - if it’s actually a character in your document.

[ajlittoz]

Apologies. I was misled by the gray background. I’ll delete my wrong comment and the follow-on discussion in a few hours so that involved persons can make boo on me before leaving a neat site.

[gabix]

Format → Paragraph → Text flow → Hyphenation. Disable by unticking Automatically.

If does not help, i. e. they are real soft hyphens, search and replace as follows:

1. \u00AD (not \x00AD!) in the search field.
2. Regular expressions on.

[Beaver110]

It’s already closed. The hypenation are not automatic, they’re soft hyphens like inserted.
They’re real soft hyphens, and \u00AD in the search field worked great. Thank you very much.

[gabix]

Then search and replace, see the second part.

[ajlittoz]

@gabix: per documentation, soft hyphens are always active, even when auto-hyphenation is disabled.

[gabix]

So what? What are you trying to say?

[ajlittoz]

Disabling auto-hyphenation is not sufficient to prevent hyphenation by soft hyphens. If the goal is to eliminate hyphenation, there is no other means than removing soft hyphens from text. Otherwise word splitting at soft hyphen takes precedence over justification if this results in less space to be distributed between words.