Mif Wash FYI [was Re: Table that won't sort correctly: wash-up]

[Chris Despopoulos]

What MIF wash actually does is simply ignore any garbage in the file.  MIF is pretty much a text representation of the binary format.  But MIF interpretation is loose, so if there's any garbage in there, saving as MIF *might* write the garbage out, but it will certainly not read it.  In this case, there most likely was something else in that string that caused it to break into two MIF string statements.  However, it was a character that the MIF interpreter doesn't understand.  So writing out to MIF triggers two string statements, but the cause of the string break doesn't make it into the MIF file.  Then on read, since there's nothing there to warrant two strings, the interpreter turns it into a single string.  


A couple of words of caution.  First, while MIF washing is absolutely safe, it's possible to manually create MIF that will crash Maker.  If you create anchored frames out of order, or tables with bad structure, look out.  I only say this if you're tempted to generate MIF from a database, or do something similar.  MIF is awesome, and pretty darned safe.  But you do have to take care in some instances.  


Second, this problem apparently occurred by opening Word in Maker???  Something like that.  There are many problems with Word to Maker.  You should not copy directly from Word into Maker...  Especially tables.  If you copy a table, then the font information gets stored in the Maker table format.  Once there, you can only get rid of it via MIF edits...  It's legal MIF, so MIF washing doesn't help.  The result can be mysterious Font Not Found messages.  You do everything possible via the GUI to get rid of that font, but it's still there.  Even the FDK (or now ExtendScript) has no access to that, so there's no way to find the font and get rid of it.  Your ONLY option is to open the file in MIF, search for the font, and delete it.  I generally copy/paste into a non-MS text editor, then copy from that and paste into Maker, then 
reformat if necessary.  For tables, I get comma separated text out of 
Word. 
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