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Lines break in the middle of words, in the middle of syllables, with no hyphens.

Anonymous
2012-05-11T18:33:53+00:00

I'm working on a Word document. Whether I use automatic hyphenation or not, and whether I use full justification or left justification,  lines are breaking in the middle of words, in the middle of syllables, in fact, even without hyphens. What's going on? How do I fix it?

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Anonymous
2012-05-11T23:22:27+00:00

Oh, it was definitely corruption, but there were dozens of paragraphs affected, so I doubt that copying and pasting everything but the final paragraph mark would have worked.

I isolated the problem in the body style. It was a ghost--not an intentional setting. So I opened up a new document, made a new body style, identical in all intentional respects to the original (though with a new name), moved that style over to the destination document, then searched and replaced all of the old body style with the new. Voila!  :)

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-04-25T17:47:01+00:00

    Much easier solution - In Word 2010 turn on paragraph marks (backwards P in Paragraph section) - you'll see a lot of little superscript 'o's or degree symbols before a lot of words (this usually happens when you copy & paste, or save a PDF as a .doc)

    > Go to 'Replace'  (or Find/Replace in earlier Word versions)

    > in 'Find What:' -  type -  ^s

    > in 'Replace with:' - press space bar once

    > Click 'Replace All'

    Walaa - all broken words are fixed!!!!!!!!!!!!  Yeah!

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-07-14T17:17:51+00:00

    Another possible cause is an interaction with Asian language formatting (I was dealing with a document received from Japan).  To fix the Asian language formatting issue, this is what I did: Go to "Start", "Programs", "Microsoft Office", "Microsoft Office Tools"; "Microsoft Office <year/version> Language Settings.

    On the tab (page) "Editing Languages", I added Korean and Japanese to the "Enabled editing language" (English was already there). Click OK. (it's okay that Korean and Japanese are neither installed nor enabled).

    Closed Word completely.  Then reopened, and opened my document again, highlighted the text, selected "Paragraph" and the "Asian Typography" tab now exists (it didn't previously). Now it is a simple issue of unchecking the box for "allow Latin text to wrap in the middle of a word" - I also unchecked the "Use Asian rules for controlling the first and last characters" and "allow hanging punctuation" options. The last one about punctuation allowed commas to start lines when it was checked.

    This response partially based upon information that I found at http://www.wordbanter.com/showthread.php?t=142604.  Copied here because this is the first page I found that addressed what I was seeing.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-04-25T23:47:35+00:00

    Very aware of broken words - it just so happens that the 'degree symbol' character that somehow attached itself throughout the documents was causing the broken words (usually through copy paste, or save as from PDF).  Hence, the solution was offered.  Was not speaking of tab characters, etc.

    In fact I just used this solution today where many of my words were broken at the end of lines throughout the documents.  It was an easy and simple fix.

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  4. Stefan Blom 342.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2012-05-11T23:09:55+00:00

    This problem suggests font or document corruption. If the problem disappears when you use another font, then the problem was with the font.

    If it's the document itself, not a particular font, causing trouble, copy the whole document except for the final paragraph mark, into a new blank document; this should take care of it.

    To show/hide nonprinting marks, including paragraph marks (¶), click the ¶ button on the Home tab.

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