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clean up troublesome characters from copy-n-paste

If you copy and paste a lot while blogging, either from web articles you are quoting or because you compose in Word and paste in, you've probably run into problems with curly quotes, em-dashes, and other "smart" characters, discovering that these don't always display correctly and may result in odd characters on your blog.

NaughtyWordChars to the rescue! If you're using UTF-8 encoding for your blog, it can automatically convert these Word characters to their plain ASCII equivalents when you save a new entry, or when you load an existing entry for editing (this requires BigPAPI). Sweet!

Note: This plugin seems to conflict with the smilies plugin; when I installed NaughtyWordChars, the smilies bar disappeared. When I disabled NaughtyWordChars, the smilies bar reappeared. Update: A new version of the plugin fixes this bug.

Comments

Do these plugins for converting Word docs into blog-friendly format work with Typepad as well, or just Movable Type? When I went to download one of the plugins, it said that for installation, I needed to unzip the file into the Movable Type directory -- as far as I know, I don't have such a directly, since I am using TypePad Thanks.

TypePad is a separate product from Movable Type and doesn't support plugins at this time. Probably the best thing to do would be to submit a support ticket from your TypePad account and request this as a new feature (I believe you can select that your ticket is a feature request).

I hope this helps!

Hey Al-Munaqabah, I've fixed the compatability problem with Smilies, if you'd like to
give it another shot.

Thanks, that works great now!

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