When you see a yucky character, or character string that you know doesn't belong anywhere in a book you are scanning, copy it and paste it in to your search box, and replace it with nothing. If there are characters or strings you find all the time in many books, you could make a file containing a list of them to remind you to search and erase them. I frequently search for the following junk characters ^ ~ \ | < > Bullets, degrees and yen signs are also characters I find where they are not wanted, but I would be careful to make sure the bullets didn't belong before deleting them. I also search for occurences of more than one space. If I have read the book already I will just replace multiple spaces with one space. If not reading the book it would probably be best to look for multiple spaces and delete them, and the unnecessary return, or junk characters that usually follow them. This reminds me that my Kurzweil frequently does something that really drives me nuts. That is rattle off a lot of garble after encountering a backslash while reading continuously. It says something like backslash m r k = some numbers and on and on until I stop it and delete or go past the backslash. Does anyone know anything about this strange behavior? Sarah Van Oosterwijck curious entity at earthlink dot net