🚀 go-pugleaf

Here's a tip I just learned from Aldus tech support (for PM-Mac).
 
The problem: Occasionally, and sometimes more than occasionally (I have 
learned through bitter experience), documents created in PM 4.0 or 4.01 
(Mac) will have stories suddenly blow up -- fonts specs will go nuts, 
with virtually every spec turning to gibberish (for example, font size,
leading, width and even subscript percentages in the thousands, and
ALL type style options turned on).  This may cause you, 
shall we say politely, some dismay, especially a day before deadline.  The 
gibberish is usually unfixable, and the everyday solution is to curse A LOT 
and then rebuild the story from a backup. If you have one. The problem
is apparently most prevalent in stories that began their lives in PM 4.0.
 
According to tech support, the best solution is to rebuild the entire 
document from scratch, using only text (ascii) files as your sources for
the text parts of your document,in PM 4.2 (Mac), which has no known bugs
of this sort. 
 
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
 
But here's a cool trick tech support mentioned -- and it's so intuitive, 
I can't imagine why I didn't find it myself:
 
(1) Double click on the Arrow tool.
(2) While holding Option & Shift, go to the "Type" menu and choose
"Hyphenation".
 
PageMaker will now do a "diagnostic rebuild."  If you hear one beep, it means
it detected no errors. Two beeps means it found some errors that it thinks it
can fix (but it may be overly optimistic). Three beeps means it found some 
errors that it knows it cannot fix. Under two-beep conditions, it sometimes 
helps to run through the diagnostic rebuild process a couple times--sometimes
it may find the fixable errors on the first pass but not actually fix them.
 
Tech support mentioned that when bringing a document into a newer version of 
PageMaker, it is always good to do a diagnostic rebuild.  
 
And it may help to delete an unfixably corrupt story, do a diagnostic rebuild,
do a "save-as", and then maybe even another diagnostic rebuild. (This last 
sentence was not mentioned by tech support, but after I did it, PM spent some
time thinking about each story the first time it had to re-display it, so I
hope something good was happening.)
 
I hope you never need to know this.  But if you do, here it is.
 
Ken Kreshtool (kik@wjh12.harvard.edu)