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Dear all,

Trying to open some older (2014, 2015) files, presumably created or modified by Mellel 3, there are strange placeholders within the text I encounter repeatedly:
[### error - illegal character ###]
The rest of the text is ok.

These markers seem to be related to multi-structured intends, maybe as part of the (very convenient) list function of Mellel.
Has anybody else encountered phenomena like this, and, more important: Are there any solutions to get rid of them?

Thanks!
JB

I have opened files created by Mellel in December 2005 (Mellel 2.x or even 1.9) in Mellel 4 without any problems at all. This file had a list included as well and I did not receive any strange message while opening it.

The [### error - illegal character ###] text shows up with some documents that Mellel 4 corrects on opening. Due to some bugs in Mellel versions in the past, documents could become contaminated with all sorts of illegal structures.

For example, it is illegal to have a footnote reference inside the text of a footnote but past versions of Mellel (way past) allowed this (by mistake) and documents containing such footnote references could carry on for years as Mellel was not enforcing this "no footnotes inside footnotes" rule when opening the document and was saving it again to disk when the file was saved.

This issue and others caused all sorts of trouble here and there and we had to manually fix many files for users that exhibited these problems. With Mellel 4.0 we've decided to enforce the rules more strictly when opening the document and any illegalities are converted to some plain text in this format [### <error> ###]. We decided not to ignore these (and leave the place blank) to ensure that user will see the trouble spots and make any further corrections that might be needed.

You should be able to locate all these issues by looking for ### and remove all these.

Hi Eyal,

Thanks for the clarification - I try to build a search & replace routine for this.

All the best,
JB