Posting and coding from Word.

[Brasil]

I'm just going to give the board a heads-up.

Apparently, if you're using any special symbols in Word documents, like spades or diamonds, they will screw up the entire post's appearance, adding weird little dashes and freakish letters.

The solution is delete those special symbols before posting.

I'm not sure if this is only on the Fiction forum, but I'm thinking it's a board-wide thing, as I saw a post last week in the lounge that was suffering from the special symbol affliction.

Adam, James, any answers to why it happens? Or just chalk it up to Word being naughty?

[Baron Samedi]

Ok Pt. Here's the real deal on it... Word can interpret the little symbols, but the basic functions of most other programs can't read them. So they'll replace this 'mystery' symbol with a funny shaped square. Not all programs have the same base, and therefore have different capabilites.

Like, on MSN, if you try to put a symbol that it doesn't cover in your screenname, a funky little square will come up. It's not just the boards. It is most places. Some fonts that you download don't include '?'s for example. Press "?" with that font, and yep, a little square. Don't fret, and don't use those symbols.

That is all you can do with it.

[Brasil]

I figured it was Word being naughty. Thanks, Baron.

[Desbreko]

[color=indigo]Ah, the joy of mixing ASCII and unicode... This is why I type my posts in Notepad, heh.

But yeah, those special characters are unicode characters, while normal text like this is standard ASCII. OtakuBoards can interpret ASCII but not unicode, so any unicode characters you try and post will end up as the messed up text that you've seen.[/color]