You would know all this if you had been a contemporary of Shakespeare
A few months ago, Maggie approached me about printing her Compendium of Common Knowledge 1558–1603 as a book.

The book is out and available. I learned all sorts of fascinating details while I was working on it, and if you’re as enamored of trivia as I am, you’ll enjoy it too. And it’s a perfect gift for a history buff.
Maggie that document
Maggie is also the eponym of the ultimate corrupted Microsoft Word document rescue technique that has come to be known as maggieing the document. Or maggying the document. Nobody really knows how to spell the gerund. Nonetheless, if your Word document starts to behave badly and you’re afraid it may be irretrievably corrupted, you should maggie the document. (This applies to version of Word up through Word 2003; Word 2007 documents are constructed quite differently and should not become corrupt in the same ways older documents can.)
Here’s how you maggie a document.
- Open a new blank document.
- In the problem document, ensure that the show/hide ¶ button is turned on so that you can see paragraph marks. Track Changes should be off.
- For each section in the document (it may only have one section, which is fine), select all of the text except the final ¶.
- Copy to the clipboard (Ctrl+C).
- Switch to the new document and paste (Ctrl+V).
- In the new document, recreate section breaks as needed and recreate all headers and footers, which will not have transferred over.
- Save the new document with a new name and close the old one.
3 Comments:
Very cool to have kept the book production in the Copyediting-L family, Dick. If you produced it, I'm sure it's gorgeous inside and out.
Dick threaded the needle; now, I'll try to stitch the Maggies together. After using the Shakespearean Maggie's Compendium (an easy to use, effective fact-checking tool) and the Word-repair maggie (a gift from Heaven), I think that these two tools -- these weapons -- are "holy saws of sacred writ."
Sally the anonymous commenter emailed me a postscript: "Oh, that was Queen Margaret (needed for the stitch, eh?) in Act 1 of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2."
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