End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 08:20 -0500 20/1/14, Fred Ridder wrote:

>There are two areas of improvements in Word versions from 2007 onwards that probably should be of interest to you because they can have a direct effect on the problem you described in your previous message. Those improvements relate to Unicode fonts and ligatures.

Useful to know.

> The recognition and proper handling of TrueType ligatures was one of the major changes in Word 2010, which I assume also trickled down to Word 2011 for Mac. Has your client recently upgraded from the Word 2007/2008 generation to Word 2010 or later?

Hard to be sure, as Word doesn't seem to put a version stamp into its binaries (if they are such) denoting its version, as FrameMaker does.  No sign of a 'docx file anywhere in the delivery. I would also assume that they worked in Windows.

I get all manner of stuff coming in from Word, in all manner of qualities and with multiple versions, but in this case I'd say probably not Word 2010+ for the delivery, as the book arrived as one large .doc file, which I then burst into chapters for import into FrameMaker. The interesting thing was that only some of the chapters showed the ligature issue: my hunch is that all three authors worked in potentially differing versions, and the lead author then munged the lot into one file for delivery and to produce a PDF. I guess I could ask, if anyone following this thread is interested.

> If their files contain "ligatures done right" from a more current version of Word, that could explain why your copy of Word 2004 doesn't recognize them at all.

Indeed, I'm sure this is the reason. The whole-book PDF doesn't show the ligatures issue, but this is to be expected from your suggestions. And only some bits showed it in the .doc import.

I am in no way trying to be critical here - in fact this book's ms was of a considerably higher technical standard than many I've worked with.

This also highlights an generic issue with publishers: the level of technical guidance for author presentation of manuscripts varies quite a bit, from detailed to almost non-existent. Probably the majority of Word users don't realise the pitfalls that it can generate. But that's a whole other issue, and doesn't belong here, interesting though it is ;-)

Thanks.
-- 
Steve