[econjack]

Just getting rid of unnecessary characters...

[Blood of Tyrants]

Something changed. You used to not have to do that.

[Eagles6]

You have your work cut out for you here on FR. We have plenty of characters.;-)

[Carpe Cerevisi]

It’s ridiculous that this website should have to resort to something like this. It needs to be brought into the 21st century.

[circlecity]

I appreciate the tip but why should we have to do this? I don’t have to do it on any other message boards. Why can’t Fr correct this and save us the hassle?

[FewsOrange]

One of the problems is that Free Republic changes the characters when you post. I will use the straight apotrophe in the following line and FR will change it to a curved apostrophe when I post or preview.

‘test’

Then if I quote what appears on FR it will display the garbage symbols

‘test’

[SquarePants]

I’m no insider to the finances at FR, but I’d think somewhere in the $320k/yr budget they might be able to squeeze in enough coding cash to address this issue. Otherwise I can live with it. I’m probably not donating again as long as certain trolls have the run of the place.

[Paladin2]

Computers can’t be programmed to perform repeated menial tasks?

[Ultima]

Use this website...it works!!!

http://dan.hersam.com/tools/smart-quotes.html

[Shadow44]

But the squiggles are an age old FR tradition!

[Paine in the Neck]

This is the kind of tedious repetitive work that computers are supposed to do automatically for us.

[ßuddaßudd]

bump-ola

[Scutter]

Sounds just like the sort of tedious, repetitive task that should be automated with software - like the software that processes every post to this site. Asking the site users to do it instead of adding it as an automated feature of the FR post algorithm is assanine, IMHO.

[Liberty Valance]

Eschew apostrophes and quotes.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

There is a website found HERE that will remove the offending punctuation marks from the original text you copied and replace with the proper quotes, hyphens and such to make the output look clean.

Example:
If you copied an article body from Breitbart and posted it raw, it would look like this:

The question of who qualifies as a “natural born citizen” may be close in some cases, but the case of Ted Cruz is easy. Constitutionally speaking, Cruz is a naturalized citizen, not “natural born.”

Take that copied text and run it through the converter at the link I provided and it will look like this when you post it:

The question of who qualifies as a "natural born citizen" may be close in some cases, but the case of Ted Cruz is easy. Constitutionally speaking, Cruz is a naturalized citizen, not "natural born."

[alexander_busek]

Thanks for the work-around!

But will this method work also for letters with umlauts or other diacritical marks?

Or is it naîve of me to believe that a mere soupçon of recoding will solve this problem? I'm not an Übermensch… Is this the Götterdämmerung of Free Republic?

Regards,

[Cobra64]

The guy who runs the web site should be embarrassed enough to do some research and rectify the situation.

[GRRRRR]

Close your tags!!

[TBP]

Is there a way that we can copy and paste without having to do that?

[MosesKnows]

The fix is easy:

Yes, many of us know that and take the necessary steps.

However, my question is why is it a problem now when it was not a problem before now?

[Auntie Mame]

bttt