Question on cutting and pasting text in Forum posts

[Don Boose]

I am having trouble cutting and pasting text into Forum posts.

In recent years, the Forum software has stopped reading italics, bold, and other special text, so I now insert HTML codes for those fonts.

Now I find that when I cut and past text that includes apostrophes, dashes, and single and double quotation marks, codes are inserted into my text.

For example, when I paste this text: QUOTE the VT-2B torpedo-riding dragon squadron emblem with the dragon’s tail wrapped around the torpedo. This aircraft (unknown BuNo) has been awarded the Navy “Et” for excellence in torpedo bombing accuracy UNQUOTE, ” it comes out like this: QUOTE the VT-2B torpedo-riding dragon squadron emblem with the dragon’s tail wrapped around the torpedo. This aircraft (unknown BuNo) has been awarded the Navy “Etâ€� for excellence in torpedo bombing accuracy. UNQUOTE

This happens whether I begin with Word or rich text format.

I can manually remove the codes, but is there a way that I can prevent them from being inserted in the first place?

Incidentally, the codes are not always inserted in short pieces of text, but always when I paste a long piece of text.

Don

[Laurence Finston]

Originally Posted by Don Boose

I can manually remove the codes, but is there a way that I can prevent them from being inserted in the first place?

It looks to me as if your originals are using multi-byte characters, UTF-8, Unicode, or something similar. You could try saving your Word document as plain text a.k.a. ASCII text. It might work to click "Save as" and give ".txt" as the file extension. You will probably get a message that this format will cause formatting information to be removed. This is what you want.

This format uses single byte characters, numbered 0 to 255, whereby the "normal" characters, letters, numbers and the common punctuation characters have values < 128 and the lower numbered ones are non-printing characters like "ring bell" or "form feed". The reason for this is that the "single byte" for a character used to have seven bits, values 0-127 and the eighth bit gives you the values 128 - 255. The problem is that the values from 128-255 aren't always used for the same thing. This is just background, all you need to do is save your text in ASCII format before copying and pasting.

[SCEtoAUX]

Just a thought but try pasting the text into Notepad then copying from that and pasting into the Forum.

[Don Boose]

Thanks Laurence and Doug for those faster-than-the-speed-of-heat responses.

Saving in plain text did the trick.

Pasting into Notepad also works, but I had to do some additional work to get the text to look the way I wanted it.

Don

[airdave]

Notepad doesn't recognize copyrighted fonts like other apps.

[Laurence Finston]

To the best of my knowledge, Notepad only works with ASCII text, so it's equivalent to my solution. What I do is paste the text into Emacs. I don't actually have to save it, it just has to be in a buffer, i.e., displayed in the window for the program. This is probably true for Notepad and any other non-formatting editor as well.