Odd character <sp> mystified my tech support

[Hank Roberts]

Word 2003 (SP2) running under XP

Since my office switched to this setup, Word docs --- both some from
2005 that I created under Word 2000, before we got XP, and hadn't
looked at since, and some new documents created by other people on our
system, show up with an odd character.

It's apparently on my PC somehow -- I see it and it prints, but others
using the same document on other computer don't see it and it doesn't
print.

It looks like <sp>
It's a single thing, hilights as a unit.
It can't be deleted by hilighting and hitting delete or backspace
It can be copied and pasted
It shows up somehow attached to images in headers
It shows up sporadically in the middle of runs of carriage returns
used by, well, users, to format pages
It shows up once in a while along with the last paragraph mark in a
document

If it's in the middle of a run of carriage returns and I select
several on either side of the weird <sp> thing, it will cut out.

If it's attached to an image, it can't be cut without losing the
image.

Tech support has been puzzling over it for weeks now.

Looks to me like it's some bit of Microsoft's Word 2007 file format
that snuck in somewhere.

Just a minor annoyance, but I figured I couldn't be the only person
favored with it.

-- Hank Roberts
-- formerly ha...@netcom.com, long long ago

[Hank Roberts]

Oops, my bad. I didn't figure out a way to search for a literal <sp>
but I just plowed through the first bunch of results for sp and
found several threads about this that we'd, er, somehow missed knowing
about.

I'll go read up. I see it's happened before.

(IS there a way to force the search to take the angle brackets and
only find the threads discussing <sp> here?)

> -- Hank Roberts
> -- formerly h...@netcom.com, long long ago

[Hank Roberts]

On Nov 21, 5:17 pm, Hank Roberts <ankh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Oops, my bad. I didn't figure out a way to search for a literal <sp>
> but I just plowed through the first bunch of results for sp and
> found several threads

This one has a workaround, though nobody has an answer about _why_ the
thing shows up, near as I can tell:

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.word.docmanagement/browse_thread/thread/17c6e76e01ee0418/9c9f3eebf3668f97?lnk=gst&q=%22%3Csp%3E%22#9c9f3eebf3668f97

[Hank Roberts]

Just checking -- has _anyone_ a clue about where this <sp> comes from?

My tech support guy just told me, they're still mystified where I
work.
I haven't found anything else on it anywhere, just the several threads
here mentioning it including mine.

[JoAnn Paules]

Do you want to know what it means or what?

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]

~~~~~
How to ask a question
http://support.microsoft.com/KB/555375

"Hank Roberts" <ank...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:21106398-15ca-467b...@e6g2000prf.googlegroups.com...

[Tony Law]

I would like to know what it means. We are having the same issue here.

[JoAnn Paules]

<sp> is space.

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]

Tech Editor for "Microsoft Publisher 2007 For Dummies"

"Tony Law" <Ton...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:68C15F95-2846-4485...@microsoft.com...

[Tony Jollans]

This is an issue I have seen reported a couple of times. The <sp> appears to
be a backspace character (ascii 8) that has somehow got fixed in the
document. IIRC it is awkward but not impossible to delete.

I have never managed to reproduce the problem myself. If you can
consistently do so, I would be very interested to know how.

--
Enjoy,
Tony

"Tony Law" <Ton...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:68C15F95-2846-4485...@microsoft.com...