Offline Blogging Problems

Not that I mind typing in the nice little boxes on my Movable Type menu, but I thought it would be nice to be able to make notes and type really long entries offline in Appleworks. Then I pasted it, previewed, all good... went back to save and ackk!! All my quotes and apostrophe's had turned into this:
& # 8 2 1 7 ; (without the spaces, of course)

It displayed correctly, apparently being HTML, but it looked awful on my end. And who knows if it looks OK on PCs, etc., I can't test for all platforms, I'm on a Mac.

So I tried saving it as plain text, RTF, in Word, in TextEdit... they all copied and pasted just the same. I could save it as HTML and it seemed to work, but only the stuff newly typed, and I got to look at the formatting which is distracting.

Finally found in the prefs "use smart quotes" and it seems to have solved the problem. It didn't convert my existing document, but it let me go in and retype the apostrophe's on Appleworks then pasted them correctly into MT.

Just a ramble, I'm tired tonight. Here's hoping that when I close and reopen the document, and restart the program that it stays nice for me.

Addendum - Out of curiousity, I was flipping through some of my archive pages (I'm trying to figure out how to make some of them just quotes instead of the full entry), and found where I had some open italics, and lots of little diamonds with question marks in them where I had a space after a URL. Couldn't see those with IE, but Opera shows everything a little differently. Started correcting them but then my eyes gave out, more things for my to do list...

Posted by Morticia at August 17, 2004 03:27 AM | TrackBack