Anyone who has ever tried to publish to the web, content that was created in Microsoft Word has come across the dreaded smart quotes when the content is displayed in anything but Internet Explorer. So if you’re sick of the weird characters you run into, here’s a surefire way to strip them out of a Word document.
- Open the offending document.
- Follow the directions here to disable the Smart Quotes feature for new edits.
- Do a global search and replace of <single-quote> for <single-quote>. This will force a series of edits, which will now stay as ordinary quotes.
- Then you can copy and paste your content into a web page and it will render as expected.
Three cheers for web standards! 🙂