Hi, I think I have a fix for this now. The credit goes to Kevin O'Brien at Affirm Press. Tom, I take your point that it is a Word problem, but when googling this problem, this message board is the highest entry with the most relevant discussion, so in the interest of helping as many people as possible, I don't think it does any harm to post a possible solution here. I will also post it on any Word message board I can find that talks about this problem.
DISCLAIMER: you could do a lot of damage by clumsy Find and Replaces in the document.xml file, so people should always do a Save As first and carefully check the results, and I accept no responsibility for unintended
outcomes.
Apostrophes problem (right to left languages)
Sometimes Word docs arrive with a strange glitch in them that stops the selection point moving one space to the right as normal when the right arrow is pressed. The selection point either hangs or jumps two spaces. The
delete key also functions strangely, especially around quote marks and apostrophes in the text.
The problem is caused by xml tags incorrectly being added to the document, applying a language that reads from right to left to certain characters (especially apostrophes, for some reason). It seems to occur when an
Apple Pages document is converted into a Word document (which is one of the reasons why we advise authors to always work in Word). My way of fixing it is to go into the underlying xml and remove all the ‘right-to-left’ tags, as follows.
XML method
- Change the file extension of your Word document from .docx to .zip.
- Don’t do an ‘Extract All’ on the results. Keep it as a zipped folder containing compressed files.
- Click through the folders to navigate to /word/document.xml.
- Copy and paste that file somewhere outside of the zip folder. This will decompress it and allow you to edit it.
- Open the file in a plain-text word-processer such as TextPad or NotePad.
- Search on all the <w:rtl/> tags and replace them with nothing (i.e. deleting them). These are self-closing xml tags. There won’t be any opening tags in the file.
- Copy document.xml back into .zip folder (you might need to delete the original file rather than overwriting it). Inside that folder, it will recompress itself.
- Change the file extension of the zipped folder from .zip back to .docx.
- Done! Open the file in Word.
