Remove Unicode value in Writer

[Drew2]

Win11 LO 7.6.4.1
A genealogy program exports text to an RTF (no other options!) but every word is in a frame (7,245 of 'em) that makes the doc unusable. Each word has a character at the end that I believe is a Unicode U+FEFF - ZERO SPACE NO-BREAK (altho I’ve forgotten how I got that info). I’ve tried Find/Replace w/ Reg Expressions in an attempt to remove but Writer can’t find any match. I’ve tried \n, \r, \uFEFF, \U65279 etc etc.
Ancestors of James Madison Sparkman Jr.rtf.odt (78.2 KB)

(I noticed with this smaller RTF it initially viewed properly for a few sec then Writer converted most of it to frames. And the initial couple of paragraphs weren’t in frames)

[Lupp]

Attach a sufficiently reduced but still significant version of such a file.

[ajlittoz]

RTF, frame … What do you mean? An RTF file is a plain text file containing a representation of a document. Consequently, there is no frame in it (unless RTF has a representation for it). IMHO, it would be simpler to handle your request with a text editor.

But provide a sample file (rather small preferentially) so that we can have an idea.

[ajlittoz]

I am not familiar with RTF encoding but it looks like your document is “composed” like a PDF.

There are many many many “objects” in the form

{\pard … \posx1234\posy4567\absw123\absh987 … 'Some text'\par}

which, in my opinion, describe a kind of text box. This breaks the logical flow of text because there is a request to position a string at absolute coordinates. There is no implied correlation between boxes. Consequently the logical flow cannot be rebuilt. Writer interprets these objects as frames which is the best it can do. And using a frame is a sensible decision because a frame can be positioned exactly where RTF requests it and text inside frame can be styled (where as it can only be direct formatted in text boxes).

I don’t think there are spurious characters at end of frame text. And anyway, U+FEFF is no no-break “spacer”. It is BYTE ORDER MARK which is relevant only at start of a file with UTF16 or UTF32 encoding.

There is nothing that can be done except to choose a different export format from your genealogy program. By the way, which is it?

[Drew2]

The program is Family Tree Maker. Actually an excellent program for genealogy work - we have over 100K of individuals that we track.

After this response I searched FTM forums and discovered that other users have the same issue. The only solution that I’ve found (so far) is to use FTM to export to PDF then convert to a usable ODT. That appears to work.

Since this is obv. a FTM issue I’ll mark this as Solved. Thanks for your help!

[ajlittoz]

FYI: I use GRAMPS

[Drew2]

Been using FTM for over a decade; one big reason I like FTM (other than inertia) - it links directly to Ancestry and other resources for research