Slay the Word and You'll Be Free
79
quotes with curls, and the sequence known as ellipses (three periods in a
row)? They've been around for long time, included on typewriter keyboards
since at least 1914.
*
Proper style calls for using these special characters to enhance readability.
But Word on the PC seems to sabotage the documents so that they can't be
used with the Mac version of Word without considerable reformatting. You
get these funny characters (see Figure 4-4) that look like they're part of an
alien alphabet from a distant planet. You also get them when you convert
Word docs to plain ASCII text.
Figure 4-4: Word's special characters look like an alien alphabet when converted to ASCII
text, or when converted from the PC to the Mac version of Word (or vice versa).
If you continue to use Word, you might want to consider at least con-
verting these special characters to something else before sending ASCII or
HTML versions of your document. You don't have to convert anything for
PDF versions, because the special characters look fine. Even if you just use
Copy and Paste to put Word text into an email message, you may find these
characters lurking about in your message. Here are quick steps to change
these special characters before converting to ASCII or HTML:
1.
Choose AutoCorrect from Word's Tools menu. This opens Word's
AutoCorrect dialog box.
2.
Select the Auto Format As You Type tab, and uncheck the option
`Straight quotes' with `smart quotes'
, as shown in Figure 4-5. (Click
to remove the check mark, turning it off.)
*
See the Virtual Typewriter Museum at www.typewritermuseum.org.
jsntm_02.book Page 79 Wednesday, September 28, 2005 1:10 PM
No Starch Press
© 2005 by Tony Bove