Did you ever write a brilliant blog post, hit “Publish” and then recoil in horror because maybe the word don’t came out looking like don’t ? Or little square boxes appeared blended among your carefully chosen words?
These are what we (the royal we) call funky characters.
Funky characters are great in B-movies and in the band Sly & the Family Stone (photo from Wikipedia), but funky characters do NOT belong in your blog.
But where, you ask, do they come from? And how, you persist, do you rid them from your life? Here is my 30-second lesson on all of the above.
The Why & The Fix
Nine times out of ten, funky characters are caused by pasting text you’ve written in a Microsoft Word document into your blog’s entry form. Word is a smart program — so smart that it likes to get tricky and include lots of hidden formatting information, which confuses your blog.
(A related problem: you paste an entry from Word and it comes out in a different font and size than you expect. The fix is the same.)
There are two key steps to the fix. First, in Microsoft Word turn off “smart quotes.” These are Word’s way of making quotation marks and apostrophes fancy (also known as curly quotes), but you don’t want fancy. You want to get the funk out.
How to turn off smart quotes:
- Instructions for un-setting smart quotes in older versions of Word
- Instructions for un-setting smart quotes in Word 2007
Second, remember how Word hides all kinds of formatting information? All your blog needs is plain text. The best way to convert Word text to plain text is to cut it from Word and paste it into a plain text editor before then pasting it into your blog. There are lots of good free plain text editors, including Notepad ++ for Windows and TextWrangler for the Mac.
0 Responses to “Keep Funky Characters Out Of Your Blog”