h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Can someone enlighten me as to why, when I create a new guide entry, all the hyphons are displayed as – and all the apostrophes are displayed as ’ ? This is becoming extremely annoying. Someone please help me!

I'm assuming your preparing it in a word mangler eg Micro$$$$ Word or similar and then pasting it into the edit window.

Because thats what happens to my posts when I do the same.

For some reason modern word programs don't like plain text.
We'll both have to wait for someone someone clever to explain why

To avoid the problem I now use a simple text editor off a magazine cover disc, the only problem being there's no spell check etc.

OK... as far as I can figure this out with this little information... the problem is in the internal representation of apostrophes and hyphens in MS Word, or whatever else you're using... It doesn't use the standard symbols, "-" and "'", but special ones... which are supposed to look prettier or something... a hyphen which is defined to be a hyphen and not a minus sign, and an apostrophe which isn't vertical but slightly twisted or something... I'm not too sure...

Anyway... Not using the standard symbols, it has to use Unicode to encode them... which is a character encoding standard with 2 bytes per character instead of only one... and as the form doesn't take those special, two byte symbols, they are replaced by – and ’, which is how you would encode them in HTML... giving the actual code of the symbol like that means "replace those 7 symbols with the character that has that code..."

Problem is, if you don't have "entry type" set to "HTML" or "GuideML", it won't be executed... and those 7 symbols will appear...

Workarounds? Use a simple editor... or manually replace those numbers when you see them... or switch to HTML or GuideML...

...I hope this was of any help...

Everyone has a simple editor on their PC. Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > Notepad. If you find Notepad to bleak, try Wordpad in the same place.