[Yaelle]

A lot of people, including me, like to whip their eyes down articles and threads, and this really slows us down. Can we fix this problem?

[Mariner]

Pinging Jim as I have the same problem with every post.

Maybe a Firefox issue?

[LostInBayport]

I have found that when I preview my post to a thread, the weird symbols pop up. I retype the quotation marks or whatever has been altered in the preview window and when I preview it again, they are correct and the post comes out perfect (typeface-wise; the content is usually complete crap).

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

Read posts “in context” while JimRob and JohnRob continue to work on this.

Only apostophes, right/left quotes are affected. Even while thread-scanning (thank you Evelyn Wood), it hasn’t been that difficult for most of us.

[FourtySeven]

From what I know the admins (and of course Jim) are aware of this issue. It seems to be something on FR’s side software related. I don’t know I’m not an expert. But they are aware of it. It seemed to happen right after that thing with Google blocking FR as a “possible malware site”. Who knows.

[Paladin2]

FR proprietary software was updated recently. This is apparently a new “feature”. The only solution is to contribute more $$$ and wait.

[Old Sarge]

Vanity: Can Someone Address the Quotation Mark Problem?

Can we quote you on that?

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

It’s not FR. You copy source has salted the content with unreadable characters to prevent what you are doing. Little binary values other than x020 (Space).

Paste your content into notepad and see what shows up.

[The Sons of Liberty]

I used to encounter this problem only when I ran a spellcheck on a pending post.
Now it seems to be present all the time on all posts when using any of the mainstream browsers - Firefox, Chrome, MS Edge.

[Mr. K]

I am not seeing it on Google Chrome

[Steely Tom]

The quotation mark problem occurs with left- and right-hand quotation marks (curly quotes), not with the normal type on most keyboards.

"Enclosed in straight quotations"
“enclosed in curly quotations.”

I think most - if not all - of the problem occurs when people cut and paste material from other websites. Quoted material you type in won't have the problem.

[timestax]

ping

[McGruff]

Apparently it has something to do with “smart quotes”:

You can use this online tool to replace smart quotes with regular straight quotes.

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

[Rebelbase]

Quotation Mark is offended and feels triggered by your internet privilege.

[sparklite2]

"Can Someone Address the Quotation Mark Problem?"

"Address the ball, Norton."
"Hello, ball!"

[Talisker]

It seems to be a “smart quotes” problem. Stupid quotes (made of straight lines) work fine.

Seems an auto find/replace code would fix it. Although, smart quotes are just another ASCII character, so something’s swapping the proper ASCII interpretation for garbage.

[Jim Robinson]

This started happening after a system software upgrade a couple weeks ago. It appears something in that upgrade affected our software’s ability to properly handle ms smart characters. John is working on finding a solution. Praying he finds it soon. It’s driving us all nuts.

Straight quotes and apostrophes from your keyboard usually work. Curly or slanted usually fail (especially on cut and paste). It’s a big pain to edit them out before posting, but can be done. “Smart” ellipses and long dashes also fail.

[zeugma]

If you use "curly quotes" marks, you will see weirdness because they are not the standard ascii quotation marks. Use standard ascii, and you don't have issues. Most likely what you're seeing is the results of people running MS-Windows doing copy/paste, that leave in the non-standard ascii quotes.

Here are a few good old-fashioned ascii quote marks for you to use. I have them to spare...
Double quotes:
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Single quotes:
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

[Rodamala]

When cut/pasting, everyone police all the quotation marks like they are brass.

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

With as much money that is collected every quarter you’d think it would be fixed