End-of-flow wildcard?

[Fred Ridder]

Maggying (named after former list member Maggie Secara, who first promoted the technique here and on the copyeditors list) was a useful technique when Word used a proprietary binary file format. The entire stylesheet and lots of other voodoo was embedded in the final pilcrow character as a big binary lump and the only way to force Word to rebuild it if it became corrupted was to Maggie the document. 

But in the current XML-based Word file format (.docx, .docm, .dotx, .dotm extensions used in Word 2007 and later) does not use the same "embed formatting in the pilcrow" technique. Instead, the single file you see is actually a zip archive that contains dozens of separate XML objects that contain all the formatting info and other metadata along with other XML objects for graphics and the text of the file. There is absolutely no evidence that Maggying has any beneficial effect on Word documents that use the Office XML format. It won't *hurt* anything to do it, but it won't fix anything, either.

-Fred Ridder

> Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 11:15:57 +0000
> To: Syed.Hosain at aeris.net; rick at rickquatro.com; craigede at hotmail.com; framers at lists.frameusers.com
> From: srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk
> Subject: RE: End-of-flow wildcard?
> 
> 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
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