I’m having some weirdness going on with my computer… it put some really weird characters into a post I made last night! So, please give some feedback on how these lines look to you guys:
This was cut and pasted from MS Word: can¡¯t won¡¯t wouldn¡¯t couldn¡¯t don¡¯tdidn¡¯t
This was cut and pasted from WordPad: can’t won’t couldn’twouldn’t
This was typed right into the new reply box on the SDMB: can’t won’t couldn’twouldn’t
So, anyone see any weird characters? If so, where are they?
Thanks all!
PS: all the above lines look perfectly normal on my comp…
It’s MS Word, Astroboy. Why, I have no idea. But it’s the only line that is screwed on my screen, all the rest are fine. Basically, it seems to reading every apostrophe you type in as some weird code and instead inserting a subscripted i, followed by a superscripted dash ( I think that’s the right description - the i is set low, the dash is set across the top ).
On my display, the MS Word line has the weird characters. All the other ones are OK. I’m suspecting that it has to do with multilanguage support, but that’s probably as helpful as telling you that I live on the third planet from the Sun. FWIW, (somehow) my browser displays CJK characters even though I (don’t think) I installed any of those fonts.
Tamerlane’s post gave me an idea - MS Word is probably automatically changing the apostrophe you type (it’s, can’t, etc.) into “real” quotes, which are not part of the standard characters on a keyboard, and this is probably causing a collision with your CJK character sets (I assume you have one). Exactly how, I have no idea, but you may want to root around in Word’s options and at least turn off this feature (I think it’s under AutoCorrection) for the time being.
For a quick background on apostrophes vs. curly quotes, go here and here.
I’m running Win 98 SE, English version… at least on my home comp, which I use to do 99% of my posting.
When I cut and paste from Word, it doesn’t look completely normal… it seems to add a space in the apostrophed word. IE: if I type “don’t” in Word, and then cut and paste it here, it comes out “don’ t”… but it doesn’t seem to matter if I take out that extra space or not.
Oh, well, no big deal… I’ll just have to remember not to write long posts in Word. I can use wordpad…
A-ha! Curly-cue apostrophe, just as I suspected! So that is the culprit - but you’ve turned off AutoCorret in MS Word, the question now is how is it getting in there anyway? Hmm…lemme root around Word for a minute…OK, now - I’m running Word XP, and under Tools > AutoCorrect Options, there are several tabs, one of which is “AutoFormat As You Type,” which I believe is the option you’ve turned off, but there is another tab with just plain-ol’ “AutoFormat,” where “smart quotes” is one of the options - do you have that somewhere in your version of Word? If so, you’ll need to turn that off as well. Good luck.
Another couple of questions: Do you yourself see the funny characters in the “reply” box when you paste them in? How about in the finished post? if the answer to either or both is “yes”, then do you use Internet Explorer? Just a hunch.
