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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