I hope this helps anyone that has had to put up with the ScribeDocSubstitute errors when no placeholder string could be found in a document - a problem that has had both us and our clients pulling our hair out.

The 360Works Scribe help page - http://docs.360works.com/index.php/Scribe#No_occurrences_of_.5Bplaceholder_string.5D_were_found_in_the_document -  offers a solution of retyping an entire placeholder due to the XML creating a split string. We've been doing this, but at times it just doesn't work and we've never seen any evidence in the XML of a split happening.

However, today we hit a eureka moment and believe the main problem is not split strings, but the use of Tracking under the Review menu in Word. With this switched on there are hidden occurrences of the placeholders in the XML that are referenced by ScribeDocSubstitute. We have had documents where the placeholder(s) has been typed, retyped and typed again (etc.)  but could not get around the error (we have a check that runs whenever we upload a Word template to FileMaker container fields, therefore documents that generate these errors are not allowed into the database). However, we've now been able to clear all errors within a file without retyping a single placeholder as follows:

open the file generating the errors in Word, click Review, click on the arrow beside/below Accept, select Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking, save the file  and test

We've been putting up with the placeholder problems since we started using Scribe and hope this helps people avoid the pain we've been through.

Andy - salefaith.com

Hi Andy,

Thanks for posting this! If you turn "Track Changes" completely off without choosing "Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking" do you get the same results? Of note, we made some improvements to this function in Scribe 2. Are you using Scribe 2 or Scribe 1?

It has been a while since we posted the above. However, in case this helps anyone who comes across this post, I can't emphasise enough how good Scribe 2.15 is in resolving this issue.

Literally frustrated customers to happy customers.

Well done guys.

Andy

Hi,

 

thank you for your post.

I've done all this accept modification and stop tracking.

But still got the same errors for some placeholder. I have 10 working, and 5 not.

Replace them at least 20 times without success.

Scribe 4.07.3

I'm lost, do you have any idea how to solve that ?

And another question.

Can Scribe save a doc file into a pdf after the replace has been done.

 

Thank you for your help.

Antoine