I have a mac at home with I believe the 2003 version of word. If I save a story with courier font and open it up on a pc with 2007 word, the quotation marks show up as unrecognizeable characters.
Are writers using courier or new courier? I prefer the darker look of courier, but am concerned that e-subs do not transfer like I read on my screen.
Anyone else experience anything similar?
Posted by Grayson Morris (Member # 9285) on :
Does it only happen when you use Courier? Interesting.
I use OpenOffice, not Word, on my Mac, but I found that my quotation marks turned odd when I saved out my formatted text as RTF. (They looked fine in OpenOffice, but Google Docs, my test case, turned them funny.) Solution was to turn off smart quotes (or whatever they're called in your software), and find-and-replace on the existing quotes.
I use Courier, which OpenOffice calls "Courier;CourierNew," for some reason.
Posted by genevive42 (Member # 8714) on :
I use Word on a pc and Courier New as my font. Maybe you should go in and change the 'smart quotes' which angles the quotes toward the text, to 'straight quotes', which are entirely vertical. In strict manuscript format, straight quotes are usually preferred. Maybe that's the reason.
I've also taken to saving everything in .rtf from the outset so there's never a conversion problem - at least not yet.
Posted by Reziac (Member # 9345) on :
The problem is likely that you're using a font that doesn't actually HAVE the smart quotes characters. So when you print, your software is substituting a graphical image for the smart quotes. HOWEVER... this will not translate with the file, so you get the next program's best guess at what the funny graphical mark is -- most likely it just sees the raw machine code, which is high ASCII.
Remember that now some programs have 'curly commas' too... I saw one here just the other day, where someone had pasted into this form. The curly comma came out as a little blip on the line, so you had to guess what it was.
The basic rule of document translation is that if the character isn't low ASCII, ie. if it isn't on your main keyboard without using any installed font at all, it doesn't exist to something on down the line.
Posted by tchernabyelo (Member # 2651) on :
Yep, it sounds like you have a problem with "smart quotes". It's a format choice you can turn off, s I'd suggest you do that (but I don't know much about Word on Macs so I can't advise you precisely how to do it...).
Posted by pdblake (Member # 9218) on :
If Word on Mac is anything like Word on Windows then it's safer to just turn off everything. If it has "smart" or "auto" in the name, uncheck it. Posted by BenM (Member # 8329) on :
I use Word 2003 on the PC and I've turned off smart quotes for this very reason.
Posted by LDWriter2 (Member # 9148) on :
Evidently I and some others here have that problem with posting. At least one person gets my quotation marks as something else and I see them on posts from at least two other people. The trouble comes when someone I send it to gets those funny characters. It's hard to predict when that happens because it doesn't happen with everyone.
It did with Strange Horizons for a while. I had to go through a retinue of changing the marks each time I sent them a story. A worse problem happened with Cosmos, they never could read my files so I gave up. Of course later I wondered if they were talking about my grammar and nitpicks making the story unreadable. Even though they didn't say it.
In an aside here: I don't think SH likes me so much, that isn't the only problem they have found with my works, one was completely my fault. So far they haven't said anything about the stories I send them but I wouldn't be surprised of they were thinking something...not to mention my writing. I guess it depends on which computer and which Word processor we each use.
[This message has been edited by LDWriter2 (edited January 18, 2011).]
Posted by Reziac (Member # 9345) on :
If you want to email me a file that's got the problem, go ahead -- I'll take a look at it with my handy hex viewer to see what's REALLY in there.
Posted by Wordcaster (Member # 9183) on :
Bingo! It was the smart quotes causing my issue. Ironically, I just submitted a story and in their guidelines it said to turn off smart quotes. Must be an issue editors see often.
