[nfbcs] Word to ASCII Translation in Recent Word Versions

[Steve Jacobson]

Peter,

While I think there is more that Microsoft could do, I don't think you are going to see this problem go away all by itself.  The landscape simply is getting more and 
more complicated.  My guess is that you are feeling the effects of Microsoft's "smart quotes" and other character replacements.  The "Smart Quote" feature 
substitutes opening and closing single and double quotation marks which of course affects the apostrophe.  Sometimes a hyphen can be replaced by another dash 
character as well which can be translated into unusual text characters.  This tends to happen when a dash stands alone rather than being imbeded in a word.

The problem is that some of these special characters are honored in a text file if the right "code page" is used, so it is not a given whether all such characters should 
be translated into their more basic forms or not.  Generally, you should be able to avoid this problem in documents you create by turning "Smart Quotes" and perhaps 
some other options off.  You could also build a series of find and replace commands and place them in a macro that you could execute before saving.  Some text 
editors such as NoteTab Pro or the one I use, UltraEdit have a fairly powerful macro capability and good Find and Replace commands that might be used to clean 
up files after they have been saved to text.  In days gone by, there used to be software that would perform conversions from one document type to another that 
sometimes provided more options.  I don't know if such utilities are still around or not.

Unless the problem you are having is different than what I have described here, I just don't think I'd hold my breath for an answer if I were you for the reasons given, 
or assume that another current version is substantially different unless the "save as" dialog has been beefed up in later versions.  

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:58:14 -0600, Peter Donahue wrote:

>Good afternoon everyone,

>    Yesterday I was made aware of some problems on one of the Web sites I 
>manage where characters were either added or mistranslated when I converted 
>content submitted to me in Microsoft Word to Text for inclusion on site 
>pages. We're currently using Microsoft Word XP which is notorious for 
>mistranslating native documents in to ASCII. We're talking about things like 
>appostrophies being replaced by question marks or a question mark appearing 
>beside an appostrophy, or quotation marks being translated in to 
>appostrophies. This is not the kind of thing you want happening if you're 
>producing documents to share with others or to post on the Internet.

>    I'd like to know if Microsoft addressed this problem in Word 2003 or 
>2007 as we're contemplating an upgrade from Office XP to Office 2007. Any 
>thoughts, suggestions, recommendations and other feedback will be very much 
>appreciated. Thanks for the help.

>Peter Donahue


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