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I have been writing a 400-page book with 1300 endnotes in Nisus Writer Pro for the last 15 or 20 years. I have kept up with upgrades. To send it to a proofreader, I have tried to convert it to Word DOCX, both directly and by passing through Word DOC. Each time, the converted text was overlaid with numerous gray rectangles across the pages, composed of small black squares.

I then exported a PDF and passed it through Adobe Acrobat Pro to Word. This produced a DOCX that displays correctly on my Mac Mini M4 running Sequoia. However, when I send it to the proofreader, the gray rectangles appear again on her Windows computer. My proofreader is now using a PDF version, which will enable me to manually type her corrections on my DOCX version.

I suppose that the gray rectangles are old formatting code from Nisus Writer Pro that Word doesn’t know what to do with. It is obviously still hidden behind the text, and I fear that it will pop up again in some future manipulation. For example, I hope to send it through Vellum for final formatting to avoid fiddling with Word. I plan to have a number of copies printed, and I am wondering if the Adobe Acrobat Pro prepress routine will eliminate those gray rectangles.

Can anyone tell me if those invisible rectangles will be a problem, and if so, how I can get rid of them? I have asked Nisus support, but don’t know if or when I will receive a reply.

Edgar

I wonder why you are doing any of this. Nisus files are native in rtf and Word can open rtf files just fine.
If you have Word yourself, just open the file in Word and save as docx to send to your proof reader.

Thanks Philip, Somehow, that direct export didn't work for me. I finally solved the problem by exporting through Mellel.