End-of-flow wildcard?

[Craig Ede]

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.

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

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.

Good luck,

Craig

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Rickaby [mailto:srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk] 
Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2014 9:26 AM
To: Craig Ede; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

At 09:07 -0600 19/1/14, Craig Ede wrote:

>Hmmm, I know I used it for searches in that version. Let me look into 
>it on my old laptop.
>
>For FM 10 it's \f. Wildcards don't have to be on.

This is getting more interesting. \f does work in FrameMaker 7, but it only
finds some instances of the '.\f' combo I'm trying to find.

However - and it's a big 'however' - the source came from Word, and the
instances of '.\f' that FrameMaker *is* finding are those I've typed, but
not those that came from Word. My guess is that - for the Word-sourced
material - what looks like a period/end of flow on screen is something else,
and/or has some invisible Word-type-crud after the period but before the end
of the flow. And copying them from the document to the Find field doesn't
work either: copy/pasting the period alone works, but doesn't work when '\f'
is added to the find string.

Probably the best way to sort this is to de-table the lot, MIF-wash it and
re-table it all again, but it's Sunday...

So the bottom line is that '\f' is what I was looking for - the Word crud is
my problem. So double thanks ;-)

--
Steve