[alancarp]

Reguarding those funky characters, I do some blogging on the Atlanta Braves, and I have observed them creeping into some of my posts there.

We use WordPress for web publishing, and sometimes we see the same artifacts. I’m not certain if they come from character encoding, though that’s my best guess. When cut-n-pasted around, though, they tend to proliferate.

99% of them are attributable to the various versions of quotation marks... most often the curly variety. A straight substitution - if that’s possible - will probably limit the hassle they present. But curiously enough, as I see below, they tend to multiply like rabbits when cut-n-pasted.

Example: “gotcha”
change to “gotcha”

[zeugma]

99% of them are attributable to the various versions of quotation marks... most often the curly variety. A straight substitution - if that’s possible - will probably limit the hassle they present. But curiously enough, as I see below, they tend to multiply like rabbits when cut-n-pasted.

Years ago we saw the same thing when people first started doing cut/paste of things from microsoft documents into news articles. It's almost all font-based. People apparently can't handle using a simple ascii single-quote or double quote characters because they aren't pretty enough looking I guess. I'm an old timer, but I really think text should be standard ascii characters. It causes a lot less formatting problems.

It could also be unicode problems.There are many, many aspects of unicode that really suck.

[Elsie]

If I see the crazy quotes in PREVIEW, I substitute them with one's from my keyboard.

They work fine then.