Word symbols not printing

You can show or hide, if you see a lot of strange symbols in the document, some or all of these
symbols by clicking the button Show/Hide ¶ (or pressing Ctrl+* or
Ctrl+Shift+8):

Notes:

• Each of nonprintable characters that you will see after highlighting this button, can be
  selected and removed from the document. Also, you can select, delete or replace all
  occurrences of a particular kind of special symbols, see
  Replacing special characters.
• There are some other useful elements that you can use in a document such as bookmarks, fields,
  etc. You can show and hide them too, independently from the nonprinting symbols. See
  How to show/hide bookmarks in a Word document,
  How to turn on or turn off highlighting off fields in a Word document.

You can selectively show only spaces in the document, only Tabulation symbols,
etc. To show or hide specific nonprintable symbols, do the following:

   1.   On the File tab, click the Options
button:

   2.   In the Word Options dialog box, open the
Display tab and then check or uncheck options as you like:

• Tab characters or Tabulations: If you check this checkbox, all tabulations
  will be shown as an arrow symbol (→):

  

  See
  A perfect text alignment using tabs
  and
  Setting tabs using the Tabs dialog box.

• Spaces can differ:
  • When you type the text, usually you separate words (sentences or even syllables in
    some languages) by pressing the Space key (also known as Spacebar).

    Usual or common space is shown as a little dot between words:

    
  • To keep words together, can a Nonbreaking space (also called
    non-breaking space, no-break space,
    non-breakable space (NBSP), hard space, or
    fixed space) be used. A Nonbreaking space in the Word document
    looks like a degree symbols between words:

    

    See
    How to keep two or several words together in a document Word.

  • Sometimes more specific spacing characters like Em Space, En Space or
    ¼ Em Space are used.

    These spaces distinguish by their width:

    • Em space means a space the same width as a lowercase m
      character.
    • En space means a space the same width as a lowercase n
      character.
    • ¼ Em space (also known as mid space) accordingly means a
      space the same width as a lowercase m character divided by 4 —
      one fourth of an Em Space wide.

    Em space and En space are shown as common space, as a little dot
    between words, but with wider gaps before and after them. ¼ Em Space looks
    like a vertical bar between words:

    

• Paragraph marks or pilcrows (¶) represent a paragraph break.

  They are inserted by Word at the end of every paragraph. In other words, it appears every
  time when you press Enter:

  

  Notes:

  1. As you can see in the example above, many of emails are formatted incorrectly. See
     How to remove paragraph symbols for every line in Word.
  2. The paragraph mark ¶ contains all the paragraph formatting. To copy all paragraph
     formatting, you can select this symbol, copy it, and then paste it into another
     paragraph. The last ¶ in the document contains formatting for the last section of the
     document, or for entire document if it contains just one section.

     See
     How to copy paragraph or numbering format without changing the text format
     and
     How to do anything with paragraph format with keyboard.

• Hidden text can be used in any Word document because it is a pre-defined format like
  Italic or Bold. It isn’t necessary to do something extra to add hidden text.

  Hidden text is shown with a dotted underline:

  

  See
  Check the document for hidden information
  and
  11 Shortcut Keys to control font format.

  Notes: In contrast of other nonprinting characters, hidden text can be
  printed. See
  How to see/show a hidden text in a Word document
  and
  How to print a hidden text in a Word document.

• Optional hyphens are used to break specific lines of text.

  They are shown as ¬.

  For example, if a lengthy word wraps to the next line and leaves a large amount of white
  space, you can insert an optional hyphen in that specific word so that the first part
  appears on the first line. If the word later moves to a different position because of
  editing, the optional hyphen does not print. If further editing moves the word back into
  a hyphenation zone, the hyphen reappears:

  

  See
  Using nonbreaking and optional hyphens.

• Object anchors are shown in a document just when you select an object.

  Any floating object in a document has an anchor that is tied to a particular paragraph
  . It can be moved, replaced or
  removed with that paragraph like its part.

  It is possible to move any anchor to any other paragraph.

• The Show all formatting marks checkbox mirrors the button Show/Hide ¶ that was
  described above. When you click to highlight that button on the ribbon or non-highlight it
  (or use shortcut keys for that), that checkbox will be checked or unchecked appropriately.

Other formatting marks that you can see in the document by clicking on the Show/Hide ¶
button:

• Line breaks:

  a) As a right-angle arrow pointing to the left
  . This symbol can be added
  to the document to start a new line, not a new paragraph, by clicking on
  Shift+Enter:

  

  b) As a right-angle arrow between two vertical lines
  . This symbol shows the
  break that separate text around object, such as a caption text or an image from the body
  text.

  

• Pagination breaks — a Column break, a Page break and a Section break
  are used for the better formatting of the document:

  

  

  

  To add the page break, just click Ctrl+Enter.

• Keep marks are shown as a small black bullet ■ on the margin next to the paragraph:

  

  Keep marks represents some of paragraph options:

  • Keep with next,
  • Keep lines together,
  • Page break before.

  See
  How to keep lines and paragraphs together in a Word document
  for more details.

  You can open the Paragraph dialog box and see keep marks by double-clicking on the
  appropriate keep mark.

• End-of-cell and End-of-row marks that you can see in tables as universal
  monetary symbol or currency sign (¤) looks like a circle with four lines
  radiating from the corner:

  

  End-of-cell marks like a paragraph marks contain formatting for the last (or only)
  paragraph in the cell and formatting for the cell.

  End-of-row marks placed at the end of each row of a table. They contain formatting
  for the row.

Notes:

• You can show or hide all these special symbols, but they are still non-printable! You can
  print just some of them.
• To delete any of these special characters, select them and press the Delete key.
• Displaying of these special characters is very helpful for troubleshooting. If your text
  doesn’t break as you like, it can be because you have too many (or the wrong) paragraphs set
  as Keep with next.

  If your printer is adding a blank page at the end of your document, it could be because of
  several empty paragraphs at the end that are forcing an extra page.

  If an automatic number insists on being bold even though you have applied bold formatting
  only to the part of the numbered paragraph, it can be because of paragraph marks. You need
  to select the paragraph mark and un-bold it, since automatic bullets and numbering take
  on the formatting of the paragraph mark.

See also this tip in French:
Comment afficher / masquer les symboles non imprimables dans le document Word.

September 5, 2009 at 2:13 pm

In earlier posts, I’ve mentioned Word’s “non-printing characters,” but only in passing. Even in my early post about the paragraph symbol (pilcrow), I didn’t go into details about the non-printing characters: what they are, how to display (and hide) them, how to troubleshoot issues involving them.

The non-printing characters are what Microsoft calls “formatting marks.” They indicate the presence of various types of formatting, but they do not print with the document, even when they are displayed on the screen. Essentially, they serve as markers or signposts that you can use to figure out what’s going on in your document.

Types of Non-Printing Characters

There are several different non-printing characters that you can display. Among them:

• The paragraph symbol or pilcrow (which contains formatting codes for the preceding paragraph)
• Tab markers, inserted when you press the Tab key (depicted as arrows)
• Spaces, inserted when you press the space bar (depicted as dots toward the vertical center of a line)
• Non-breaking spaces, inserted when you press Ctrl Shift space bar (depicted as a degree symbol)
• Line breaks (depicted as a bent left-pointing arrow)
• Page breaks (depicted as a densely dotted line with the words “Page Break” in the middle)
• Section breaks (depicted as a two densely dotted lines with the words “Section Break,” followed by the type of break (Next Page) or (Continuous), in the middle); note that section breaks contain the instructions for the page formatting — margins, headers and footers, page orientation, etc. — of the section preceding the break
• Column breaks (depicted as a dotted line with the words “Column Break” in the middle)
• Hidden text (depicted as a dense line of dots — usually colored a shade of purple — immediately underneath the text)**
• Optional or conditional (“soft”) hyphens, inserted when you press Ctrl hyphen (depicted as a hyphen with a short vertical extension at the right side)
• Non-breaking (“hard”) hyphens, inserted when you press Ctrl Shift hyphen (which looks almost exactly like an en dash but is slightly higher up)
• Object anchors, used to pin graphics or other “floating” items to a particular location in a document (depicted as an anchor)
• End-of-cell and end-of row markers in tables (depicted as a circle with lines coming out of it; to me the symbol looks something like a mini-sun); these markers contain formatting codes for the individual cell and row, respectively

Another non-printing character you’ll see at times is a small black square that appears in the margin to the left of a paragraph. That symbol indicates that someone has applied one or more of the following Line and Page Break options found in the paragraph dialog: Keep with next, Keep lines together, Page break before, or Suppress line numbers (the mark doesn’t appear if Widow/Orphan control or Don’t hyphenate has been applied).

In addition, when you display the non-printing characters, you will see any codes you have inserted to mark items for inclusion in a generated Table of Authorities (TOA). (The same is true if you use TC codes to mark the Table of Contents, or TOC.) CAUTION: Although those codes won’t print when you send the document to the printer, you need to remember to hide the non-printing characters before generating the TOA (and/or TOC). The reason is that the displayed codes do take up space in the document, and they can bump a citation to the next page, such that when you generate, the pagination in the TOA (and/or TOC) will be incorrect.

Codes used to mark Index entries, ordinarily invisible, also will appear when you display the non-printing characters.

How to Display or Hide the Non-Printing Characters

To display or hide the non-printing characters, press the key combination Ctrl Shift * (asterisk) — the asterisk is located above the number 8 in the row of number keys at the top of your keyboard. That key combination, which works in all recent versions of Word, is a toggle. Press once to display the characters; press a second time to hide them.

Alternatively, you can click the paragraph icon that is located on the Standard toolbar in versions of Word up through Word 2003 and in the Paragraph group on the Home tab in Word 2007.

Troubleshooting the Non-Printing Characters

If you have pressed Ctrl Shift * (asterisk) or clicked the paragraph symbol a couple of times in an attempt to hide the non-printing characters but some or all of them remain visible, they’re probably enabled in the Word Options. You’ll need to go into the options and disable them.

In versions of Word prior to Word 2007, click the Tools menu, Options, and look at the View tab. About halfway down, you’ll see a section labeled Formatting Marks. Click to uncheck any boxes with checkmarks in them (including “All”). Be sure to save your settings by clicking OK. After doing so, you should be able to hide the non-printing characters in the normal way again. In Word 2007, click the Office button, Word Options, Display, and do the same. (Note that in Word 2007, the “All” option has been renamed “Show all formatting marks.”)

Codes That Aren’t Considered Non-Printing Characters

Most of the field codes (date codes, page number codes, file name and path codes, etc.) are not considered non-printing characters and won’t display when you press Ctrl Shift * (asterisk) or click the paragraph symbol. To display those codes, press Alt F9. (Press Alt F9 again to hide them and show the code results instead.)

Bookmarks aren’t non-printing characters, and you can’t use Alt F9 to display them. Instead, in versions of Word up through Word 2003, click the Tools menu, Options, navigate to the top portion of the View tab, click to check Bookmarks, and click OK. In Word 2007, click the Office button, Word Options, Advanced, scroll about halfway down to Show document content, and check Bookmarks (if that option is unchecked), then OK out. Note that displaying bookmarks doesn’t reveal their content. Rather, bookmarks appear as gray brackets around bookmarked text.

Finding and Replacing Non-Printing Characters

You can search for (and/or replace) many of the non-printing characters. Just invoke the Find dialog with Ctrl F (or press Ctrl H to open the dialog to the Find and Replace tab), click the More button to display all of the Find options, then click the Special button. You can search for any of these characters:

• the non-printing paragraph mark (note that you can search for paragraph symbols you have inserted into the text as characters, but keep in mind the difference between the two. Word uses the term “paragraph mark” to mean the non-printing character and the term “paragraph character” to mean the symbol inserted into your document as printable text)
• tab characters
• non-breaking spaces (but not regular spaces inserted by pressing the space bar)***
• non-breaking hyphens
• optional / conditional (“soft”) hyphens
• manual line breaks
• section breaks

Note that if you like, you can insert the caret symbol (the one over the number 6 in the row of numbers at the top of your keyboard) and the appropriate letter or character if you wish to search for one of these non-printing characters. For example, you can type ^p if you want to search for the non-printing paragraph symbol.

You can replace a non-printing character with nothing (leave the Replace with box empty), with another character (including but not limited to non-printing characters), or with text.

Printing the Non-Printing Characters

As far as I know, there is no easy way to print the non-printing characters, though conceivably you could use Find and Replace to substitute printable paragraph characters for non-printing paragraph marks (and use similar workarounds for other non-printing characters). The only simple method that occurs to me is to take a screenshot by using Print Scrn (or using a program such as SnagIt) and pasting the contents of the clipboard into a blank document.

**To hide text, select it, open the Font dialog (by pressing Ctrl D or using any other method you prefer), and clicking the checkbox next to “Hidden.”

***If you search for “White Space,” Word will find normal spaces, but if you have several consecutive spaces, it highlights all of them as a group, rather than individually. Also, a search for “White Space” turns up other non-printing characters (including non-breaking spaces and non-breaking hyphens) in addition to normal spaces.

Entry filed under: Uncategorized.

So, as I am on the verge of ripping my hair out… lol … I thought I would post here and hope for some HELP!

I have a document that I have open in Word 2003 (was created in Word 2010) and, the author has inserted a  symbol instead of a check box (using the Insert, Symbol) and, I have had NO luck getting it to print. If I print preview, it shows up. If I print to PDF, it shows up and if I print that PDF, it prints on the page but, I cannot get it to show up on the printed page IF I print directly from Word….which I have to do as I have inserted a Macro in that prints sequential numbers on each page that is printed.

I have looked in the options, googled till my fingers were raw and, I cannot find anything to fix this.

What I also tried was, to highlight each «symbol» and change the font to «Symbol» as the whole document was Times New Roman and, that didn’t work either.

I cannot change this document in any way without it going through an approval process for a new revision so, changing the symbol to a check box is not an option.

Any ideas?