[Web4lib] Copying text from Word to Emacs/vi

[Thomas Bennett]

Don't know if this would make a difference and assuming you are opening eith 
Microsoft Word, try opening the document in Open Office Writer and see if you 
get the same results.  Might be worth it to try on different platforms.

Thomas

On Thursday 26 February 2009 16:14:07 Bob Long 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.
>
> 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?

-- 
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Thomas McMillan Grant Bennett           Appalachian State University
Operations & Systems Analyst            P O Box 32026
University Library                                Boone, North Carolina 28608
(828) 262 6587

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