I don’t know how to fix the character stuff, either.
“I don’t know how to fix the character stuff, either.”
“I don’t know how to fix the character stuff, either.”
Manually remove the apostrophes, quotation marks, and Question marks of things you paste in and replace them. I don’t know why that works but it does. Use the preview button to check if you have them all. It is a pain on a long article but it works. See I did that with your post
always preview. backspace over and replace all "curly" apostrophes and "curly" quotation marks with regular keyboard ones. preview again and get any others... when preview is clean, mash Post.
Please take a look at this thread for how to fix it (there are three methods that are pretty easy discussed in the thread): http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3359105/posts
"don’t" above is the perfect example of the problem. All we're trying for is a simple single-quotation mark -- don't. When copied and pasted, hidden special character coding is not so "hidden" anymore. And in this case even got worse -- the superscript character "TM" got reinterpreted into its hidden special-character encoding when I copied and pasted it.
It's time-consuming, but this works for me: You have to remove the (hidden) special characters. The most common ones are double- and single quotes.
If you composed your article in Word, or are copying in an excerpt from a newspaper or magazine, which you paste into the Post Reply box, chances are high that you are smuggling in these special characters in droves. When you paste the text, they will view like ordinary double or single "straight" quotes, instead of the typographic "curly" quotes that you'll see in the source article.
That is, they will still "look like" normal straight double and single quotes to you. But hit the Post button, and they will view like gobbledegook forever after.
So with pasted material, any time you see a single or double quotation mark, delete it, and type in ' or shift ' ["] for single and double quotation marks respectively. They will then view normally when posted.
There are two other big offenders of hidden special characters, the em dash, and the en dash.
I can't depict either one of them here, for neither would view correctly. But an "em dash" is just an extra-long hyphen. Replace them when you see them in your original text with a double hyphen (see paragraph 1 for an example). An "en dash" is slightly longer than a hyphen; technically, it is half the length of the em dash. It is usually used to express a range (e.g., "18-20 years ago"). Replace these with a single hyphen.
Hope this helps!