InDesign: undeletable # character appearing after having suppressed a table of contents

Question

I'm currently working on a draft of a book to which I bring orthographic corrections before publication.

Here is the problem I come across.

The draft sent by the author contains a table of contents that I want to remove ( in order to rewrite it afterwards).

However, when I try to suppress this table of contents ( using selection, then " cut") the character " # " appears in place of the suppressed text; and this character cannot be deleted ( at least I cannot delete it).

Could you please tell me how comes this "#" appears , and how I could get rid of this problem.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There could be an empty text box placeholder introduced via the master page. Check what you have on the master page.

Alternatively, you can do a CTRL+Click on the page where you have that trailing "#". This should possibly unlock a text box introduced via the master page and then you could probably delete it.

If the above won't work, trying checking if there are any locked layers and/or locked objects on the page, which main contain an empty text box.

Answer 2

My guess is, that what you're seeing is the End of Story symbol, which is a "#".

When hidden characters are shown, a "#" is present as the last character in all text stories.

It can't be deleted and it isn't visible in the final PDF or on print.

To avoid seeing it you can use Type > Show/Hide Hidden Characters (Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + I) to toggle the visibility of hidden characters or you can just press W to toggle between Normal and Preview mode.