Remove end-of-line hyphens in Word 2011 for Mac

ms office

I have a Word file that was created from a 2-column, fully justified PDF file. Since I want to convert it next to a Mobi format via Calibre, I need to remove the end-of-line hyphens that break words, otherwise I'll get this in Mobi: “remo-ve".

Does Word 2011 for Mac allow to justify text without hyphenation?

About 2/3 of all end-of-line hyphens are followed by a space (weird!). I suspect this file is not behaving normally due to the fact that it comes from a PDF.

Things I’ve tried with no result:

  1. Changed to left-align
  2. Changed font size
  3. In Tools/Hyphenation/Hyphenation zone, I increased the hyphenation zone to a whole inch
  4. I played with a few of the Options related to the Hyphenation algorithm under Preferences/Compatibility
  5. I right-clicked on paragraph, and under Line and Page breaks, selected "Don't Hyphenate".

Hyphens still there! I need a uniform solution, file is too big to go through the one by one.

Best Answer

You're right, the hyphens are artifacts from importing text from a PDF.

One way to do this (my preferred way, anyway) is to copy as plain text into a text editor such as Text Wrangler. The hyphens generally have a space after them when importing so I do a find and replace starting with that pattern. Then the resulting clean text can be imported or pasted into Word. Not a application solution but it works pretty well for me.

  • Copy PDF content to clipboard
  • Paste as plain text into a text editor that supports find and replace (Such as Sublime Text, Text Wrangler, Atom or even VS Code.)
  • Do a Find and Replace of "- " Hyphen space without the quotes.
  • Replace with Null or empty string. In other words, put nothing in the replace field.
  • Copy the resulted text to the clipboard
  • Paste the text into the Word document and apply desired formatting.

Text Wrangler find dialog

Related Question