MS Word hyphens

Ann_Camilla

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Dec 14, 2016, 6:30:17 AM12/14/16

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Anyone met this problem? A manuscript of loads of chapters came from an author filled with dates plus an extensive bibliography with ranges of page numbers (dates like 1746-66, page numbers like pp.12-197). All the hyphens were missing when I imported each chapter into InDesign (CS6). In all the time I've been typesetting books, this has never happened before. Any suggestions as to what I can do to prevent this happening again?

Season's greetings to you all.

Ann

Andrew Brown

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Dec 14, 2016, 7:06:46 AM12/14/16

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> On 14 Dec 2016, at 12:30, Ann_Camilla <camill...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone met this problem? A manuscript of loads of chapters came from an author filled with dates plus an extensive bibliography with ranges of page numbers (dates like 1746-66, page numbers like pp.12-197). All the hyphens were missing when I imported each chapter into InDesign (CS6). In all the time I've been typesetting books, this has never happened before. Any suggestions as to what I can do to prevent this happening again?

A Word file perhaps? I have seen this quite recently, on a small scale, and I typed in the hyphens one by one.

You could replace all the hyphens in the Word files with something that InDesign is able to convert, a currency symbol perhaps, Adobe is fond of them.

AB

Dick Margulis

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Dec 14, 2016, 8:30:50 AM12/14/16

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This sounds like an Office 2007 bug that was fixed with the first
service pack for that suite. If so, that means the author (or someone
between the author and you) opened the files in obsolete, unsupported
software. The solution is to take a two-by-four upside the head of the
author and stand over them while they fix the problem on their end.

However, short of that, open the files in Word and replace hyphens with
en dashes, which is what they should have been in the first place, and
then import again.

Ann_Camilla

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Dec 14, 2016, 9:08:22 AM12/14/16

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Thanks for your help Andrew and Dick. Who knows when/where the author got his MS Word from and I simply didn't notice until very late on so it got utterly boring. I'll just have to remember for the next book (already here) from the publisher. Anyway, many thanks.