Table that won't sort correctly

[Steve Rickaby]

Title says it all. Material sourced from Word (groan): I suspect gremlin characters are messing up sort. 

I need to alpha-sort some 60 pp. Each entry starts with '[ref]' in left column, where 'ref' is the reference marker. When sorted on col 1, the results aren't alpha. Some sorting has taken place, but not a lot. There may be gremlins: in many lines, positioning the insert cursor at the start of the line and pressing the right arrow key does not advance the cursor past the '[' until the right arrow key is pressed again.

Copying one of the offending '<invisible character>[' pairs to the Find dialog fails to find the character pair. However, searching for '^[' with wildcards on shows that the not-sorted lines do not start with just '[', even though that's all that is visible. Equally, lines that *have* sorted ok *do* start with just '['.

So: I know why it's not working, but no how to fix it.

Helpful ideas, anyone?

FrameMaker 7.0p757 for Mac.
-- 
Steve