trouble with hyphenation in Word for Mac

[sextus]

I have a Word document that I and several other people, one of them in
Europe, have been passing around editing for a couple of years now.
Today I was notified that it needed hyphenation because some lines of
justified text contained ugly gaps. I went to the tools menu and hit
the "Hyphenation" menu, and when the dialog box came up I checked
"Automatically hyphenate document." Nothing happened, other than the
appearance of a box informing me that Hyphenation was complete. No
words were hyphenated, no text was made less gappy.

I then tried selecting text in the document and doing the same thing.
Still nothing. Then I tried narrowing the "Hyphenation zone" to 0.1".
Still nothing. Then I hit the "Manual" button both with and without
selecting text. No change in the gappy text, and if I removed the
right justification, the text stayed just as ragged and no hyphenated
words appeared. I just got the box that cheerfully told me that
Hyphenation was complete.

I noticed that somehow along the way, spelling and grammar proofing
had been turned off. I wonder if that's relevant, because I know
hyphenation also uses a dictionary. I managed to turn the spelling and
grammar proofing back on, but I have no idea how to turn the
hyphenation dictionary back on, if that's the problem. I wonder if the
European editor somehow turned it off to deal with some language
issue. The text is in U.S. English, but there are a lot of German
words. (I tried designating the text as U.S. English using the
"Language" menu; that's what turned the spelling and grammar proofing
back on, but it didn't affect hyphenation, apparently.)

Hyphenation works just fine on Word other documents I've created
myself on this machine, it just won't work on this documents, or,
actually, this set of several documents, which are chapters in a
book.

I also can't select words in this document by double-clicking on them
or paragraphs by continuing to click on them. Again, that's only a
problem on this particular document, and I don't know if it's relevant
at all to the hyphenation issue.

Can anybody give me a hand?

 

[Patty Winter]

I have a Word document that I and several other people, one of them in
Europe, have been passing around editing for a couple of years now.

I went to the tools menu and hit
the "Hyphenation" menu, and when the dialog box came up I checked
"Automatically hyphenate document." Nothing happened

I also can't select words in this document by double-clicking on them
or paragraphs by continuing to click on them. Again, that's only a
problem on this particular document, and I don't know if it's relevant
at all to the hyphenation issue.

Is there any chance that you could copy and paste the text from this
document into a new Word document? It sounds like the current document
has some significant corruption.


Patty

 

[sextus]

Is there any chance that you could copy and paste the text from this
document into a new Word document? It sounds like the current document
has some significant corruption.

Patty

Thanks for the suggestion, but I actually did that. Didn't help. New
doc had all the same difficulties.


Harvey

 

[Patty Winter]

On Oct 3, 12:32 pm, Patty Winter <[email protected]> wrote:

[unneeded text deleted]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I actually did that. Didn't help. New
doc had all the same difficulties.

I'll let someone who's more familiar with this aspect than I am
explain it better, but I believe that the final paragraph mark
in a Word document contains information that affects the entire
document. I've seen recommendations to other people with corrupted
files that they copy and paste everything except that mark.

Oh, here you go:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826864

That page is about MS Word for Windows, but I think the principle
is the same in Word Mac. Scroll down to the section headed, "Copy
Everything Except the Last Paragraph Mark to a New Document."


Patty

 

[Lane]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I actually did that. Didn't help. New
doc had all the same difficulties.


Harvey

Copy and paste the text to the texteditor in OSX. Then save the
document and reopen this document. Then copy/paste the text from the
texteditor document to Word. This might do the tric.
Let me know (keep the original for you will loose the layout completely)

Lane