Word copy & paste warning
The IABC Café was built using Wordpress, an excellent open source blog platform built on open standards such as XHTML. Standards often rely on other standards to get things done, and in this case the blog’s XHTML expects a type of character encoding called UTF-8.
Enter Microsoft, which marches to the tune of a different drummer. MSWord in particular loves foisting Windows (non-UTF) character sets on the world, and seems even more fond of doing silent character substitution as you type, turning the ’straight’ apostrophes and quotes on your keyboard into curly ones, turning asterisks into custom bullet characters, etc.
That in and of itself is not so bad, but when you copy & paste directly from Word into the comment window, you run the risk of sending malformed XHTML to Wordpress, which in turn will display your post in unpredictable ways, if at all. At least one humorous post on this subject can be found on Wordpress’ site.
If your only reason for using MSWord is for spellcheck, good news: there are several nice freeware text editors out there that have built in spellcheck. Please note that I don’t endorse any particular package–I’m just making you aware of them in case they are of any help:
Windows:
Crimson Editor
PSPad
TextPad
Mac OSX:
TextWrangler
There is also a free spellchecker plugin for IE called ieSpell — thank you Jerry and Charles!
If you don’t have the time or desire to monkey with a new program, your only Word workaround is as follows:
1. Spellcheck your document.
2. Do a “save as” in Word.
3. In the “save as type” dropdown, select “MS-DOS text”.
4. Save to location of choice. File will be saved with a .TXT extension.
5. Open up the .TXT file you just saved.
6. Copy & paste into comment textarea input box.
That should do it. If it doesn’t, may I suggest typing?
– Chris Hall
P.S. This advice applies to all HTML text input boxes on the web, not just those on this blog. I for one would never rely on MS to do character substitution “for me” any more than I’d want a target server or browser fixing it on my behalf.
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