Posted on March 25th, 2009
Why do I see funny looking characters when I copy from Word to my website's admin page?
If you are copying text from a Word document into your website's admin page, you may notice when viewing the page in a browser that there are many funny looking characters. These are formatted characters Word uses that your browser cannot display. While you can manually type over them in your admin page, you can also convert your Word document before copying the text. To do so, follow these steps:
- Once your editing in Word is complete, choose File->Save As
- Choose from the format drop-menu the option 'Plain Text (*.txt)'
- Save the file to a known location (your Desktop, or My Documents, etc.)
- A dialog box will appear asking you about encoding: Choose 'other encoding'
- From the options on the right, select Unicode (UTF-8)
- Check the 'Allow Character Substitution' box
- You'll see in the preview that all characters such as "curly quotes" are replaced with "safe" ones. You can now save the text file
You can now open the saved text file and copy the contents into your website's admin page.
