End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:56 -0600 19/1/14, Craig Ede wrote:

>Well, I'm getting an even more peculiar result in FM7.0p579
>The search dialog gives me an error saying I need to have text in the search
>box when I look for \f alone.

How odd. FM7.0p577 for Mac here, and it works just fine. (I didn't know there was a p579 ;-)

>If I change the search to something like .\f (to search for a period before
>and end of flow) it finds all periods.

I suppose that's consistent with '\f' not working. Sort of.

>Similarly with space. But it ignores the end of flow symbol and so finds periods at the end of every sentence or spaces wherever they occur. Useless!

Indeed.

>Regarding Word inserting things:
>It might work to copy one of the offending text sequences and then search
>and replace with text via FrameMaker replace so you have a known series of
>characters. There are things MIF wash doesn't seem to deal with. I get table
>padding from Word that seems to be impossible to remove without creating a
>new table and then pasting the content into it.

Ah. Um... [thinks...]

Going to end of flow and typing backspace/delete requires two key presses to delete the stop, suggesting strongly that there is an invisible something there. MIFfing the file and looking at it in a text editor (TextWrangler) shows something like this at the end of a cell:

       <String `P'>
        <Font
         <FTag `Emphasis'>
         <FChangeBar No>
         <FLocked No>
        > # end of Font
        <String `roceedings of PLoP 1996'>
        <Font
         <FTag `'>
         <FLocked No>
        > # end of Font
        <String `.'>
       > # end of ParaLine
      > # end of Para
     > # end of CellContent
    > # end of Cell
   > # end of Row

('PLoP', for the curious, is a conference series, 'Patterns Languages of Programming')

So it looks like there's a needless font switch in the way. However, a few cells down, we have this:

      <Font
         <FTag `'>
         <FLocked No>
        > # end of Font
        <String `New York: Oxford University '>
       > # end of ParaLine
       <ParaLine
        <String `Press.'>
       > # end of ParaLine
      > # end of Para
     > # end of CellContent
    > # end of Cell
   > # end of Row

...but FrameMaker can't find the period at the end of 'Press' either! And again, in the document, two deletes at the end of flow are required to delete the period.

This substantiates your suggestion that Word crud can even hide in a MIF. A binary editor might find them, but I don't have one here.

'Go figure', as my US pal likes to write ;-)

-- 
Steve