To eliminate the weird "curly quotes," etc, characters in the text. Seems many news pages are using MS Word to produce their articles and MS Word inserts special smart characters for curly quotes, apostrophes, long dashes, etc. When you cut and paste from these pages, the special characters create an unsightly mess on your post. The routine at the source strips them out, actually, converts them to regular quotes, apostrophes and dashes.
From the source:
This is a repost of an entry from 2004. This Word-cleaning functionality is showing up in more and more web editors, but people might still find this useful.
Most of the time when I'm writing content for the web (for this blog, or a forum comment, or whatever), I'll write in Microsoft Word for the spell check and other features that aren't in a standard textarea widget, and then I'll cut and paste into the form on the site.
The problem is that this carries all of the high characters ("smart-quotes" and the like) that MS Word makes straight through to the site -- and most sites aren't set up to handle them. They expect plain ("Latin") text.
A solution: this script converts text copied from MS word into plain text. Paste your input into the top box, press clean, and the input will be scrubbed and sent to the lower box.
(If you want to clean up Word HTML, rather than just create plain text, I suggest that you use HTML Tidy with the "clean" and "Word 2000" boxes checked.)
This is a repost of an entry from 2004. This Word-cleaning functionality is showing up in more and more web editors, but people might still find this useful.
Most of the time when I'm writing content for the web (for this blog, or a forum comment, or whatever), I'll write in Microsoft Word for the spell check and other features that aren't in a standard textarea widget, and then I'll cut and paste into the form on the site.
The problem is that this carries all of the high characters ("smart-quotes" and the like) that MS Word makes straight through to the site -- and most sites aren't set up to handle them. They expect plain ("Latin") text.
A solution: this script converts text copied from MS word into plain text. Paste your input into the top box, press clean, and the input will be scrubbed and sent to the lower box.
(If you want to clean up Word HTML, rather than just create plain text, I suggest that you use HTML Tidy with the "clean" and "Word 2000" boxes checked.)
Had to "clean" the text I cut and pasted from his page. LOL
Citizens – pregnant or otherwise – are now tangible cardboard targets for
“law enforcement.” Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., a provider of shooting
targets to the Department of Homeland Security, has admitted that targets depicting
pregnant women were “requested” by law enforcement agencies. These targets
“feature children, elderly gun owners and mothers in playgrounds, and… a
pregnant woman.” Awesome. They were REQUESTED by DHS, even. Since the story about
these targets started spreading throughout the interwebs, the pictures of them have
supposedly been taken down. But you know how the Internet has a way of allowing
graphics to live forever.
Test:
Citizens -- pregnant or otherwise -- are now tangible cardboard targets for "law enforcement."
Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., a provider of shooting targets to the Department of Homeland Security, has admitted that targets depicting pregnant women were "requested" by law enforcement agencies.
These targets "feature children, elderly gun owners and mothers in playgrounds, and... a pregnant woman."
Awesome. They were REQUESTED by DHS, even.
Since the story about these targets started spreading throughout the interwebs, the pictures of them have supposedly been taken down. But you know how the Internet has a way of allowing graphics to live forever.