Recently, I've been using SRWE for find/replace operations in OPW, in preference to the standard FIND. Subsequently, on copying a large black of text from an OPW document to the Windows clipboard then pasting it into a WORD document, I noticed frequent occurrences of a specific (unwanted) character throughout the document. The character is a white ? inside a black diamond --- in Unicode(hex) this has character code FFFD. The character is not visible in the original OPW document nor in a PDF file generated from the OPW document, but it is visible in the DDL file when opened in Notepad --- the character appears as a narrow rectangle.
This is easily repeatable. For example, type ... "The quick brown fox" Then, using SRWE, replace "quick" with "QUICK", thus ... "The QUICK brown fox"Then copy the above line to the Windows clipboard, and paste it into a MSWORD document. You should see ...
"The ?QUICK brown fox" (i.e. the same line, but with the unwanted FFFD character before the "Q" of QUICK.
If the unwanted characters are not visible in OPW or PDF documents, why is this a problem? Well, it can be a problem in subsequent find/replace operations in OPW where the (invisible) FFFD character occurs in the middle of the string that you want to find.
Is this a bug in SRWE and is there a simple solution, other than saving an OPW document as a DDL file, then opening it in Notepad, and doing a find/replace for all the unwanted characters?
-- C.B.
