Comments on: Fast fixes for five Word woes
Change the word processor's most enervating default settings to your liking.
Most Popular
15 sites that went kaput in 2009
Web sites launch all the time, but they also shut their doors. We highlight 15 that bit the dust this year.
Top 10 news stories of the decade
Let the debate begin: Was the iPhone more important than iTunes? Was anything bigger than Google finding a great business model? CNET offers its list of the 10 most important stories of the '00s.
About Workers' Edge
Dennis O'Reilly has covered PCs and other technologies in print and online since 1985. Along with more than a decade as editor for Ziff-Davis's Computer Select, Dennis edited PC World's award-winning Here's How section for more than seven years. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.
Add this feed to your online news reader
Workers' Edge topics
I build templates in my page layout app and then just type in them. Oh, and, since I use a Mac, (primarily, my Mac also boots into XP) - I use Pages in iWork. I am a professional author and it does everything I need. And costs only $70 to buy...
Someday Microsoft will give up and feature overloaded apps and come back to the real world....
The real world uses a lot of features not found in iWork(or any of the other packages, for that matter), which is why we don't use them
Maybe you'll one day graduate to needing the feature set, but I somehow doubt it.
Punctuation symbols have meanings and proper usages that have evolved over centuries. To corrupt them simply because we are now too lazy to overcome the mundane technological hurdles we have imposed upon ourselves is a poverty of our culture. Word will export HTML of curly quotes with the correct embedded codes to read properly in browsers if you simply learn how to use the tool. It takes seconds if you care enough.
This is indicative of a larger, insidious cultural by-product of the desktop publishing revolution: the software industry has trained computer users to care more about their own ease of production of communications than the needs of the readers of those communications. Nobody learns anymore (other than specialists and graphic designers) how people read and what makes that reading easier, more productive, and more accurate. But people will surely get upset if you tell them they can't slather text from one side of the page all the way to the other in their Word files with 0.25" margins. The DTP mantra is ?Screw the reader, this is how I work, I can ?fit more on the page? this way, and I'm not changing....? Sad.
(By the way, the ?fit more on the page? excuse is blatant horse waste: take any Word file you've created, change it to a 2-column layout and count the words per page before and after....you'll see that multiple columns actually increases what you can fit on a page while also reducing line length and making reading easier in most cases....I use this here as an example only because it's the one I hear most from belligerent desktop publishers I'm often hired to re-train.)
Microsoft recognized the lack of concern for correct usage of these punctuation marks among its users when developing Word. And in a rare instance of cultural responsibility, Redmond built in the AutoCorrect entry for quote marks specifically to remove the technological hurdles to using them correctly. To undermine that due to ignorance and indifference is poor advice. Leave them on, learn how to use all the tools in your publishing chain thoroughly, and get serious about your communications.
Note how in my previous comment, the user interface of this comment system allows me to input straight versus curly quotes as I type, but displays the curlies incorrectly. We should be able to expect better from c|net, a technology leader, no?
I can see we're on the same page here, b_baggins...Our replies crossed in cyberspace. Uppity Typographers Unite!
I'll ruin it for you.
Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text
For those of us who don't want to go to a mac - but need a great word ( office) replacement program. go to openoffice.org and download openoffice. I have Office - and for most tasks I prefer Openoffice. It has a word processor - database - spreadsheet - powerpoint type application and more. They are VERY office compatible. Also included is a PDF generator right on the tool bar next to printer Icon, a VERY helpful and welcome addition in my opinion.
There is an app for everything these days, holy hell
- by b93950 April 27, 2008 1:24 PM PDT
- Punctuation fonts are not recognized when posting online using MS Word 2002 and Mozilla browser:
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(13 Comments)They appear as follows:
All I can say is that it?s about time these?.
When they should look like this:
All I can say is that it?s about time these?