As many of you have probably realized, there is an annoying technical glitch on BMG (and other soapblox sites) at the moment. When you copy and paste text from another source (such as an online newspaper article, or a document prepared in a word processor) in the course of writing a post, several special characters render incorrectly: they show up as a question mark (“?”), rather than what they were supposed to be. The powers that be are working on it.
In the meantime, it is possible to avoid this problem, which is particularly acute with respect to single and double quotation marks. When you paste your text into the “new post” box, check the quotation marks to see whether they go straight up and down, or whether they are “smart quotation marks” (i.e., they point left and right depending on whether they begin or end the quotation). At present, the “smart quotes” are not rendering properly, so you should go through the document and change them all to ordinary up-and-down single and double quotes. Same thing with em- and en-dashes — replace them with a single or double hyphen. UPDATE: You can also use a two-step cut and paste: first, paste the text into Notepad, which will remove smart quotes and other formatting; then paste it into the “write a new post” box. Thanks to Mr. L for the tip.
Sorry for the inconvenience — we hope it will be resolved soon.
… the fix I tell people is (on windows machines) to post the comment into notepad first and then copy it from notepad to BMG (or whatever).
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I have encountered the problem in enough places in my work that I have notepad shortcut on my quick launch.
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Also useful for stripping formatting out of a text string.
I knew I married him for some reason or other!
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He is, of course, the fastest Excel draw in the East…well, eastern Mass at least. đŸ˜‰
… that was Lynne,… who obviously forgot to log me out and log in as herself.
is to use Apple or *nix products. đŸ˜€
Smart Quotes and similar non-ASCII text is a problem in general, and I actually think it’s good that SoapBlox is now breaking on it, because that means people will have to fix what they post, rather than post the junk characters which will then make it hard for other people to copy from Blue Mass Group posts. Just don’t use these kinds of characters on the web, they’re not portable.
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For OS X, my friend Brian wrote a very simple utility called Pastefix. It waits in the background for you to call it up with a hotkey, and when you do, it converts all the text in your clipboard to ASCII and gives you the option of saving the result right back into your clipboard. It also has an “IRC option” to split long lines up into shorter lines (don’t do that for bluemassgroup posting).
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The default hotkey (which I suggested đŸ™‚ is Cmd-Shift-C, which is convenient ’cause you just hit Cmd-C to copy text to the clipboard, so leave your fingers where they are, use the other hand to hold down shift, and hit C a second time.