Table that won't sort correctly: wash-up

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:24 +0000 8/12/12, Steve Rickaby wrote:

>Plain old MIF-ing fixes it.

This is interesting, as it provided a specific example of an invisible (to the eye) problem that MIF-washing fixes.

To recap, I had a large table whose first column contained entries of the form '[xxxx]', where 'xxxx' was a reference marker. The text had originated in Word, and the table didn't sort properly when the first column was used as the sort key.

In the MIF, quite a lot of the first column entries were of the form:

      <ParaLine
        <String `['>
        <String `xxxx]'>
      > # end of ParaLine

In other words, the '[xxxx]' entry consisted of two separate but adjacent strings. This messed up the sort. The only visible evidence of this on the screen was that it took one more right-cursor movement to advance from the start of the line to past the '[' as expected. Also, the wildcard pattern '^[' didn't get a match.

Clearly one of the things that FrameMaker does when parsing MIF is to spot adjacent strings like this and concatenate them. Useful to know. Why the text came out of Word like this is another question altogether. But with Word, who knows?

-- 
Steve