Google docs thinks citations are incorrectly spelled words

[dwitvliet]

Short-style citations used e.g. by the journal Nature are recognized by Google Docs as incorrectly spelled words. This style has a superscript number immediately following a word, making Google Docs think it is one word

For examples:

Some reference¹.

Here "reference¹" is recognized as an incorrectly spelled word:

Did you mean: reference 1

It becomes quite a nuisance when every word preceding a citation is marked as an incorrectly spelled word.

[dstillman]

This looks to me like a bug in Google Docs. The same thing happen if I just type "reference" and then type "1" and make it superscript. (If I enable superscript first and then type "1", it doesn't underline it immediately, but if I move text around it eventually does.)

It does look like we could fix this by inserting a zero-width no-break space before the superscript, though. It's possible those characters could cause trouble in some other contexts (e.g., if you export the document and it gets rendered in a font without that character), but it's a valid Unicode character, and it seems unlikely that Google will fix this anytime soon, so it might be worth doing.

[dwitvliet]

Thank you for the prompt response! I agree it seems like a Google Docs issue. It is not a critical, so it can be ignored if the zero-width space insert fix will create more problems.