?format=light question

[amalthia]

When I save entries in ?format=light and actually ?style=mine I get these weird characters in the body of the text. here's an example

can’t
“You’re
doesn’t

I'm not sure why this is happening. I'm saving the files as plain html.

EDIT: I'm realizing based on some of the responses that I didn't explain fully enough. In web browsers the text looks fine. It's only when I open the file in Word or Wordpad (to look at the code) that the weird characters show up. Normally, Microsoft Word is rather good about opening HTML files.

Comments

[viridian_magpie]

I can't tell you how to stop this but these are the characters that substitute apostrophes. I usually encounter them on ff.net.
Have you tried using ` instead of ' as an apostrophe?

[the_shoshanna]

This is a text encoding problem; the weird characters are your system's attempts to present, in those cases, apostrophes. Dashes, smart (curly) quotation marks, and ellipses may also show up that way. I doubt it has anything to do with format=light or style=mine, unless you have a text encoding defined in your style or something. I don't know enough about what's going on under the hood to explain it, let alone fix it, but I can say that every now and then I open a journal page that shows such things, and changing the text encoding (in my browser, Camino, it's in the View menu) will fix it; usually I change it to UTF-8, but rarely that doesn't work and I have to try others at random. So fiddle around with text encodings and see what happens!

[amalthia]

I've been experimenting today and I found htat if I open the documents in Notepad and save as unicode then when I open it back up in Wordpad all the funky formatting is gone.

I've also found that I need to manually select UTF-8 in Microsoft Word to get the text back to what it should look like. I don't know why from the Browser it's view in UTF-8 then when I save the story it appears to be saving it as Western ISO (8859-1)

I've gone to my Firefox Font settings and set it to UTF-8 but it doesn't appear to work for the entire browser, just the page you're on.

This whole thing is rather puzzling because it only happens on a few pages. So I'm not sure if it's how the author had posted the stories that made it so that the default is Western ISO (8859-1) or something is going wrong in my browser, wordpad, and microsoft word. Or if ?format=light automatically puts everything in Western ISO (8859-1) and if so how do you fix that? Normally on LJ ?style=mine would prevent the weird coding from happening but on Dreamwidth that doesn't appear to be the case. But again not on all stories being posted via DW.

[zvi]

Somewhere under the view or preferences menu of your browser, you should be able to select "Text encoding" or something similar. You should re-open any files you download from DW as UTF-8.

[zellieh]

I'm not an expert, but it may be something to do with character encoding; I usually see this on some webpages, and if I go to Firefox's View - Character Encoding, I get a list of commonly-used encoding, and switching between those options often makes the apostrophes and speechmarks show up normally again. So maybe it could be worth checking your browser settings?

[amalthia]

I'll look into my browser settings to see how it's saving files.

browsers

[dorothy1901]

I used to have this problem all the time with Firefox. I got around it by switching from Firefox to the Google Chrome browser.

If you care, the correspondences are:

‘ is apostrophe (curly)
’ is apostrophe (curly)
“ is quotation mark (curly)
†is quotation mark (curly)
"“ is -- (maybe?)
— is --
"¦ is ... (maybe?)
é is é

ETA: FWIW, I use Western (ISO-8859-1) as the default character encoding in both Firefox and Chrome.

Re: browsers

[amalthia]

thanks I'll give this a try!

Re: browsers

[amalthia]

Okay, I've been playing with this quite a bit this afternoon. I've concluded that Western (ISO-8859-1) shows the “ type coding on the webpage. And I've found a few work around such as opening the html with notepad and then saving the html file as unicode. Then when I open it in Wordpad all the “ are fixed with the proper text. None of this makes sense because it's not happening on all stories but I haven't seen anywhere to change your posts to different unicode types.