[Web4lib] Copying text from Word to Emacs/vi

[Thomas Dowling]

On 02/26/2009 04:14 PM, Bob Long wrote:

> 
> 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 had this problem too, and found two solutions.  I believe it's
ultimately due to Microsoft using characters for things like curly
quotes that are not defined in your terminal emulator's character set
(#147 and #148 for curly single quotes, etc. when #128 - #159 are
undefined).

One solution was to switch my terminal emulator program (are you using
PuTTY?).  You may need to do some comparison shopping.  The other was to
copy from Word and paste into a good text editor on your desktop - one
that is adept at handling character encoding.  You may have to
explicitly change the character encoding in the editor.  Then copy from
there and paste into vi.



HTH.

-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu