[Web4lib] Copying text from Word to Emacs/vi

[Jon Gorman]

On 2/26/09, Bob Long <rlong at talb.lib.md.us> wrote:
> 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.
>

Why not install emacs or vi on your local machine?  Of course, I'd
also have any webpages or the like either in a CMS or a version
control system so it's easier to keep track of changes and updates.

> 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.
>

Sounds like you're using the Windows latin-1 encoding by default.  I'm
guessing some of the employees are using older versions of Windows.
You want to make sure it saves as unicode and hopefully it'll convert
the encoding as needed.  Of course, how you do that depends on your
version of Word and also probably the version that folks are sending
to you.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101212491033.aspx

Of course, most likely your emacs and terminal settings probably
aren't very unicode friendly either, so using characters outside the
original ASCII set are likely to cause problems.


Jon Gorman