When I paste text from Google Documents into LibreOffice Writer it contains grey Ⅰ characters. These usually occur at the beginning of headings and could not be selected or removed by deleting the text around them. Unchecking View > Field Shadings hides them.
What are they and how could they be completely removed from the document?
Advice to paste unformatted text won’t help me, I want the text formatting but without these characters.
They are not non-breaking spaces.
That are likely “Bookmarks”. You can see them in category “Bookmarks” in the Navigator in the sidebar.
Those are formatting marks which don’t print nor export to pdf; they are there to assist the writer of the document know what is there. If you remove them, then you remove the cross reference relating to it.
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I like to see where the references are but if you don’t want to see them, then click Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > Formatting Aids and under Display Formatting, untick Bookmarks and OK.