will continue to display until you turn them off in Options. If you have characters such as paragraph marks, spaces, or tab marks ticked in the Word Options dialog, then switching off Show Hidden Characters will only switch off the items that are not ticked in Word Options. Turning this button off on the ribbon will also untick the “Show all formatting marks” in the Word Options dialog. If you tick this box, the Show/Hide button will be toggled on when you look at the document again. “Show all formatting marks” box acts as a toggle switch for the Show/Hide button on the ribbon. Then under “Always show these formatting marks on the screen”, tick the items that you want to show permanently. Just go to File | Options, and click on the Display tab. Doing this isn’t usually necessary and make Word very cluttered and difficult to work with, but ‘each to their own’. If you find you are regularly needing to look at the hidden characters in your document, it is possible to make some or all display permanently. So to hide the characters again, just press Control+Shift+8 or click the Show/Hide button again.
The paragraph is broken with a Line Breakīoth the keyboard and mouse methods of showing hidden characters act as toggles. The text isn’t centered, someone has used tabs instead, and there are unnecessary tabs after the text. Here’s a document with an off-center heading and a paragraph with strange text wrapping. Once we can see all these things, it becomes a lot easier to find the culprits causing problems, and remove them. The next page section break at the bottom, is what is pushing text to the next page.
The Section Break (Continuous) in the middle of the right-hand column make the two-column setting to become single column then back to two-column. We can now see all the paragraph marks, indents, and several different section breaks that are making our text do strange things. Mouse, simply click the Show/Hide button on the Home tab.įor example, in the document below, I have a few strange things happening – text in columns with strange gaps in the column, and the text has stopped halfway down the page, even though there is more following on the next page.See Understand the Show All markers in WordĪs with most things in Word, you can use either a keyboard shortcut or the mouse to see the hidden formatting characters. Tabs, Section Breaks, Paragraph Marks even Spaces are all exposed by Show All. Show all is the easy way to see all the underlying formatting to help you figure out what’s happening. At some point commonsense prevailed and now ‘Show All’ is on the Home tab, Paragraph section.
Early versions of Word had a ‘Show All’ option but it was hidden away because Microsoft believed their software was so good, such a tool was not necessary. Microsoft Word was designed to hide all the formatting and technicalities (WYSIWYG). That’s where ‘Show All’ becomes essential. On the References tab, in the Index group, click Mark Entry. To enter your own text as an indexentry, click where you want to insert the index entry. To use existing text as an indexentry, select the text. It helps figure out what’s going on when the layout doesn’t behave. Mark words or phrases Mark entries for text that spans a range of pages Mark words or phrases. Acrobat only cares about duplicating the exact layout, and not about generating a properly-structured, sanely-editable Word doc.If you are working on a Word document with complex formatting, sometimes you need to see the hidden characters and unseen workings.
This is all because Acrobat tries very hard to force the document to slavishly match the PDF layout by setting up all kinds of extreme formatting which often breaks down due to differences in fonts, etc., or if you edit the doc in any way. There may be some hidden formatting fields that you need to get rid of. Likewise, if there are any tables, you'll need to edit the table cell formatting. After you click this button, it then appears highlighted to let you know that the function is turned on.
The face of the button looks like the paragraph mark (¶).
Then click the Show/Hide Non-Printing Characters button in the Paragraph button group. That'll show a dialog where you'll need to reset some strange Indentation and Spacing settings. To show non-printing characters in Word, click the Home tab in the Ribbon. In Word, position your cursor to the paragraph before and after those gaps and click the little arrow pointing southeast at the bottom, right corner of Home, Paragraph section of ribbon. They're indirectly caused by some obscure paragraph formatting that Acrobat sets up on the surrounding paragraphs. Probably you "can't do anything about" the gaps because they're not actually on the page.