Character Cleaner

[autographedcat]

If you've ever had a problem with transferring text from an application like Microsoft Word to an all-text medium, due to Word's fetish with "smart quotes" and other silliness, check out The Character Cleaner, which will convert the special characters into straight-text suitable for using on webpages.

(Found via jimhenleyrss)

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

You just handed me a potential *major* increase in work productivity. I have to do this every day, and although I've grown very good at "search and replace," it's time-consuming as hell.

Thank you!

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! I have a lot of apps on my Linux box that absolutely choke on a lot of special characters, so I try really hard to make sure what I do publish on the web is ASCII.

Or, as I instafilked on rec.music.filk (to the tune of "Cecilia" by Simon and Garfunkle):

Oh cedillas
You're breaking my screen
My character set won't support you

No cedillas
Avoid umlauts too
I might die a critic, but please
use ASCII

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Hee! "die a critic."

You rock.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

You can actually turn off the smart quotes and other hullaballoo.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, and that's a good thing to do for your own documents. But if you've ever had to deal with someone else's documents and make them presentable for an ASCII medium, it's a PITA.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

True. What does Word do if you just save it to text?

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Saving Word docs as text leaves in the fancy stuff. It's a real pain in the butt for those of us who, for instance, spend our days transforming other people's Word-generated copy into Web pages. I swear, I spend more time cleaning up junk characters than I do on actual copy-editing.

I've tried to teach people to turn off the fancy formatting, but most of them don't even know what I'm talking about.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

Sweet. I've been putting off (for ages) trying to make a set of vim macros to do that.

I use notepad...

[yduras.livejournal.com]

I've gotten into the habit of cutting and pasting into notepad and then copying out of notepad to whatever else I am doing. That seems to get most of it.

Does this preserve bolding and italics?