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I'm trying to clean up a piece of text I've copied from an OCR'd PDF. Currently the text contains a lot of (what I assume are) soft hyphens. This makes it difficult to 'Find' them in Notepad or Microsoft Word, which means it's difficult to delete them from the text.

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Do you have an example of where that would not be possible?

If they are just in plain text, you can simply search for them, and if the exist, you can substitute them by nothing. Note that a different encoding can give you different results, so try emacs or Notepad++...

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Well, this may be difficult. Here is a small chunk of the text: "než ja­kákoli řeč". If you copy that into Notepad, you should see a soft hyphen appearing between the 'a' and 'k' of 'jakákoli'. But if you don't see it, I'm not sure what to do. –  76987 Oct 30 '11 at 8:40
I have copied it into emacs, copied hyphen into buffer, pasted it into the "search" slot, and then search and deleted it just fine. You can download emacs for Windows, or maybe use another programmer's editor. –  jjmerelo Oct 30 '11 at 8:51
All right, I copied it into Notepad++ and it worked: I was able to do a Find and Replace. Thanks a lot. –  76987 Oct 30 '11 at 8:59

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