After merging Documents through DOCX Merge smart service, getting an error Word found unreadable content in "test 1.docx"

Question

Hi Team, 
 Getting below error while trying to open downloaded document from Appian after merging with smart service DOCX Merge: 
 Error: 
 Word found unreadable content in "test 1.docx". Do you want to recover the contents of this document? If you trust the source of this document, click Yes. 
 Regards, Sandeep

Mike Schmitt · Answer

What are the contents of the original DOCX files pre-merger? Are the original ones openable with no errors? Is anything getting generated new? 
 Usually when I see this error it's because a special character was added to the document and not sanitized first. These include standard characters like &, < and >. These must be replaced by their escaped XML equivalents prior to being used (i.e. in the "word doc from template" smart service) or else you'll get an identical error when opening. The error will also give a position number where the error occurs, which maps to a text position within the source .XML file contained in the .docx Zip file (if you open a .docx using a Zip file manager, you'll see it's just a zip file btw). If you open that XML file and go to the position indicated you'll likely be able to find the source of the error, which is how I originally learned about this weakness. Granted if you're just merging 2 already-working DOCX files, i'm not sure this is quite the issue, but the error message you're getting is the same.

After merging Documents through DOCX Merge smart service, getting an error Word found unreadable content in "test 1.docx"

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