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What's with all the question marks instead of punctuation? How do I fix it so people with Firefox can read my story?
Solution
The problem arises because of Word's insistence on replacing punctuation with special characters. The fic thus displays fine when using Internet Explorer, but as soon as you step away from the great umbrella of Microsoft products, you run into trouble. Specifically, all the special characters display as question marks for users of Mozilla, of which your friendly neighborhood site mummy is one.
Since you want your superkeen story to be read and enjoyed by all, you want to fix it, right? The best way to fix it is to turn it off inside Word. To do this, you would go to the Tools menu, then Autocorrect. In the first tab, which is for replacing text as you type, find the entry for ellipses (...) and delete it. Then go over to the tabs marked "Autoformat" and "Autoformat as you type" and de-select the options for replacing quotes with smart quotes, and replacing symbol characters with symbols. This won't fix your older entries, but it will mean the ones you type in the future shouldn't have problems. Fixing the existing ones involves going through, either in Word after you've made the changes or in another program, and replacing each and every one of the mangled punctuation marks, so it's probably the less desirable option.
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Article details
Article ID:
19
Category:
Formatting Submissions
Date added:
2010-01-07 03:03:09
Views:
115
Rating (Votes):
(1)
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