End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 18:51 -0800 19/1/14, Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain at aeris.net) wrote:

>A slow process (would take me a day or two for around less than 100 page documents), but resulted in cleaner FM files ultimately. Also gave me a chance to read the document and verify what I wanted it to say and look like. :)

I always 'maggy' a Word document to get a clean copy before import, and I've not had too many issues. But it would be good to get the L/F characters out.

Having said 'not too many issues', this book has thrown up some new ones. The source is from three authors working in Word in Finland: quite a lot of inter-word spaces disappeared, and for some - but not all - files, all the ligatures ('fl', 'fi' etc) disappeared too! I've never seen this before in a couple of decades of inter-working between Word and FrameMaker. So 'flow' became 'ow', 'first' became 'rst', 'configuration' became 'conguration' and so on. These are the sorts of things that make an editor's life fun :-(

['Maggying', for anyone not familiar with it, consists of copying all of a Word document except the final pilcrow, then pasting it into a new, clean Word document and working with that. I believe the technique was named after its originator. It can solve a lot of issues with Word, as apparently the final pilcrow 'hides' a great deal of Word-crud.]

-- 
Steve