Adventures in posting.

[my_tara_tory]

So I tried my first adventure into posting a bit of story. I got to practice the lj cut thingie, too. I did a copy / paste from Word. The LJ spellcheck (which was designed by orcs) didn't like all my apostrophes and so I spent time finding and replacing each one. My ghod, do I have to do that every time I want to post a story? Because it was

Comments

[swtalmnd]

You can also do it in word, by turning off Smart Quotes first off, and then right before you post, do a "just to make sure" find and replace of (and yes, this is going to seem stupid) ' with ' -- that'll get rid of all the curly apostrophes and put in browser-friendly normal ones. I'd also do " with " if I were you, and possibly the longer dash (which won't display if I put it in here) with -- and the all-in-one ellipse character with three actual dots (...).

The problem is, curly quotes and apostrophes, as well as em-dashes and other fancy characters Word auto-inserts because they look prettier in print, can show up really wrong in a browser and make your story look highly funky when read, especially cross-platform, because they're not ASCII standard characters. Sometimes they don't show at all (I get that in a lot of your ISF stories, where I have to mentally insert a dash or ellipse), and sometimes they can show as really strange, out-of-place things like a capital o with an umlaut above it, in place of all your apostrophes, depending on who's reading on what browser.