Does anybody know what this symbol (¬) means?

[Denise]

Hi,

I'm editing a text in Word. I changed the page setup and suddenly apperead
this symbol ¬ inside the words... The "Find" option does not recognize it (I
wanted to use it in order to cancel all the "intruders").
Does anybody know what's that and how can I get rid of it?

Thank you,
Denise

 

[Stefan Blom]

¬ represents an optional hyphen, when you are showing nonprinting marks, and
it will display as on "ordinary" hyphen (-) when the word in question occurs
hyphenated at the end of a line.

To hide the ¬ symbol, turn off the display of nonprinting marks.

 

[StevenM]

To: Denise,

If you're working with the hidden characters shown, then a conditional
hyphen is shown as ¬. If this is the case, and if you still want to delete
them with Find, go to Special characters and find "Optional Hyphen."

Steven Craig Miller

 

[grammatim]

That tells you that there's an optional hyphen in the word at that
point -- if it occurs at the end of a line, the word will break there
and only there.

If you click the paragraph mark button in your Toolbar (or somewhere
in your Ribbon!), or type Ctrl-Shift-*, _all_ the Non-Printing
Characters, including the important ones like Paragraph Break and
Tab, ,will go away. But maybe the checkbox for Discretionary Hyphens
(is that what they're called?) in Tools > Options > View is checked.

(That's where you go to always show the useful ones and not show the
ones you only need once in a while, such as this one and the spaces
between words.)