toadstoolcouch in ljgenie

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Jan 18, 2012 12:48

I'm using OpenOffice, saving my files as a Word file, and noticed that little boxes are appearing where the start quotation mark and first letter of the word should be. The ending quotation mark gets erased as well. So, why is this happening, and how do I stop it? Should I save the files as the default ODT? Use a different word proccessor? My ( ... )

tags: open office

Comments (4)

dsgood

You might try LibreOffice. It's a fork (schism) from OpenOffice; and in my opinion it works better.

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toadstoolcouch

Thanks for the rec! I was hoping for an alternative to OpenOffice, honestly

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palmir

From what I can tell, Word parses OpenOffice-saved .doc files weirdly (especially if you have a spreadsheet portion pasted in - where OOO integrates Calc and Writer, Word and Excel are apparently too different). For the quotation mark, though, it sounds like Open Office is trying to automagically turn them into stylized quotes and failing, or you're using a funky font that doesn't come with quotation marks for some reason. Checking the former is in the Autocorrect options (Tools -> Autocorrect Options) under the localized options tab. The latter would be fixed by just switching font.

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kengr

My guess is that you have been bitten by MS's "compatability".

Word (by a default that is a pain to change) uses what MS calls "smart quotes". It automatically replaces characters like quote("), apostrophe(') and a number of others with "better looking" characters.

The problem is that MS placed those characters in a range of character codes that are *reserved* in the ISO 8859 standard. So, for example, Windows-1252 is different from the default charactetr set on the web ISO 8859-1 because it's using these "illegal" characters.

With the advent of Unicode, there "same" characters are available in a way that works with non-MS stuff. But you still have to arrange to *convert* all the MS-only characters to something the rest of the world recognizes.

Here's a chart of the MS Windows only characters, with Unicode equivalents.

http://www.shadowgard.com/~shadow/chartest/windows-1252.html

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toadstoolcouch in ljgenie

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Comments (4)

dsgood

toadstoolcouch

palmir

kengr

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