[Web4lib] Copying text from Word to Emacs/vi

[Bob Long]

A lot of my work with our website involves copying text that staff have 
sent to me in a Word document and either adding it to an existing page 
or using it to create a new page.

I'm a little old fashioned and like to work directly on the server, 
typically using Emacs as my editor. But I've noticed this problem also 
occurs in vi.

The problem is that when I copy the text from the Word document into 
Emacs, certain characters come out as periods rather than the original 
character. The biggest culprit seems to be apostrophes. But also include 
quotation marks, emdashes, and ellipsis to name a few others.

I've tried what I would consider to be the obvious workarounds for this; 
saving the Word document as a plain-text document and copying from 
there, saving the Word document as a html file and copying from there. 
Nothing seems to work.

I suppose I could do my editing in Notepad (everything copies fine from 
Word to Notepad) and ftp it all back and forth. But I don't work that 
way. I like to copy the text to Emacs, add a few tags, done!

Is there a way to copy text from a Word document into Emacs without 
having to go through and clean up all of those infernal periods?

-- 
Robert Long, Library Systems Administrator
Talbot County Free Library
410 822 1626 (v)
410 820 8217 (f)