WEIRD SYMBOLS

Lately, I’ve noticed an inordinate amount of weird symbols showing up in my blog posts, almost always in the block quotes. Apparently, a lot more bloggers and news sites are composing their entries in word processing programs and then posting them. For whatever reason, whether it’s a function of Movable Type or the Verdana font I use, a lot of these don’t translate properly when I cut and paste them into my editor and publish them to OTB. I usually catch these quickly, but not always.

FILED UNDER: OTB History,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Matthew says:

    It’s not an MT error, I don’t think. Blogger sometimes suffers from the same problem. It’s that special characters — curved quote marks, emdash characters, etc. — don’t work well in forms. If somebody wants to use them, they should change the character to the relevant ampersand code or just not use them at all.

  2. Steven says:

    I have the same problem. In fact, if I write something in Word, I often have to fix quotation marks, dashes and other symbols when I cut and paste into MT.