"Fun" with soft hyphens

[Steffen Heller]

I create PDF documents from my Confluence pages.

Now, I recognized that text in table cells is sometimes broken in mid-sentence like here on this screenshot in "tempera-ture" and "de-pend-ent":

I want to get rid of this and I already know the reason for this. It is soft hyphens in the page's source code (the "­" in between words) . The part with the word "de-pend-ent" looks like this, for example:

Device de­pend­ent (maxi­mum 127 °C)

Two questions:

1. How can I get rid of these soft hyphens?
2. How can I make sure I don't get them in the first place?

1.
If I go in "Edit" mode of the Confluence page (left) or open the source code in the Firefox Developer Tools (right), the soft hyphens are not displayed at all.

Hence, no chance to grab and delete them.

The only way to detect and show them is to open the source code in the Firefox Developer Tools and then also click "Edit HTML". 
If I do this, the part with "de-pend-ent" looks like this: the soft hyphens are displayed as little red dots:

So, opening the whole page in this specific HTML display and then search for little red dots, is the best way I know at the moment.

2.
How do these soft hyphens (unintentionally) get in the source code?

Is there a shortcut to enter them, a setting to automatically create them or can they infect a page when text is copied from Word or some other source?

Does anybody know?

[Fabian Lim]

Hi @Steffen Heller

I would ccopy from the source and paste the text into notepad to remove all formatting and paste it back to confluence.

Not ideal if you have a lot of content, but it's better than having to go to the developers tool to edit.

Regards