Has anyone else had problems when "Updating Plain Text" from HTML?

Jon Cass:

I've been experiencing the same problem ever since the switch to the new WYSWYG.   Would love to see this bug fixed soon!

This happens when your HTML content includes Windows-1252 characters that do not exist in ISO-8859-1 (the charset used in Convio). Convio's Engineering team is currently working on fixing this bug. In the meantime, you might want to check the character encoding setting in Dreamweaver. For best compatibility with Convio you'd want it set to ISO-8859-1 (Western Europe).

Josh Armstrong:

Thanks for the response, Noah (almost a month a ago; sorry I did not respond sooner).

I am continuing to experiecne the problem, even when you typing into the WYSIWYG and pulling contend over to the Plain Text... it still converts the apostrophes and quotes to the HTML code... Maybe there is somehting else I can do?

Thanks for your thoguhts.

Josh

What browser are you using? I just tested in IE7, IE8, and Firefox 3.5, and when apostrophes or quotes are entered directly into the WYSIWYG they are not converted to HTML character entities in Plain Text.

Josh Armstrong:

Thanks for looking into this. You are correct Noah... it doesn't happen when I type it, but does happen when I paste from Office products like Word or Outlook (both from Office 2007). whether I use the "paste from Word" button or just paste directly without that, it comes in with the extra characters.

I use Firefox (3.5).

This is most likely because you're pasting curly quotes from Word into the HTML content.  Plain text considers curly quotes and em dashes, etc. to be special characters and will convert them to HTML - it will leave straight up and down quotes alone.

Here's how you can fix this:

• write your copy in Word
• Save As and choose Plain Text and check the box for "Allow character substitution"
  
• close Word
• open the txt file with Notepad
• copy and paste from Notepad
  

Josh Armstrong:

Thanks for the reply Sally. But then I lose the formatting of bold and italics, right?

That's correct - you'd have to edit your HTML to put back the bold and italics by either using the WYSIWYG or editing the code by hand.

On the other hand, if you want to keep the formatting from Word for bold and italics, then you'll have to go edit the plain text by hand to replace the HTML characters with regular quotes, apostrophes, and em dashes. I used to have to do this when I was a client and I eventually found it was easier to just re-format the bold and italics rather than hunting for all the special characters to replace them.

Here's a thought, Josh - you could edit the options in Word to disable it completely from inserting any special characters and to force it to leave your quotes, apostropes, em dashes, etc. alone.  Then you could keep your fomatting and still use Update Plain Text.

I'm not necessarily a fan of this approach because when copying directly from Word you get a lot of extra HTML garbage that Word inserts into the document.  If you ever View Source you'll see the extra code that Microsoft products insert.  This can sometimes interfere with the layout of a page or email depending on the browser or email client.  (It should look fine in Outlook since that is also a Microsoft product but it might look weird in Yahoo or Gmail.)  But if keeping the formatting is more important to you, then this could be the way to go.

By the way, I left out an important step in my previous post - when Saving As from Word, you need to check the box "Allow character substitution" to force the curly quotes back to straight.  I'll edit my previous post to reflect this.

afleisher :

Here's a new one I will add to this thread because I believe it's related.

When pasting text from Notepad (a necessary habit I formed over the past few years of using the old WYSIWYG), I'm getting a very strange effect where the text I pasted appears twice, but one instance is invisible.  Here's a code sample:

<div id="_mcePaste" style="position: absolute; left: -10000px; top: 0px; width: 1px; height: 1px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden;"><span style="font-size: 120%;">Dear Andrea,</span></div>

<div id="_mcePaste" style="position: absolute; left: -10000px; top: 0px; width: 1px; height: 1px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden;"></div>

<div id="_mcePaste" style="position: absolute; left: -10000px; top: 0px; width: 1px; height: 1px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden;"><span style="font-size: 120%;">Warm wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season and New Year.</span></div>

<div id="_mcePaste" style="position: absolute; left: -10000px; top: 0px; width: 1px; height: 1px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden;"></div>

<p><span style="font-size: 120%;">Warm wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season and New Year.</span></p>

Sometimes I don't realize it until go to Update Plain Text, and then its evident.

I thought that pasting from a Microsoft Office app, such as Word or Outlook, into Notepad, and then from Notepad to Convio WYSIWYG would paste the plainest kind of text possible.  I'm baffled!  And frustrated!

What should I do?  This code is a real pain to clean up.

Thanks.

I've had this problem as well, but also notice that the plain text editor likes to create unwanted line breaks, especially around conditionals.  I've spent hours fixing line breaks after edits and updates.  Any suggestions?

Josh Armstrong:

(I also get unwanted line breaks and don't know what to do either. But it happens, at elas tI've noticed, when pasting from Word/Office products, but not notepad... but I don't always want to paste from notepad so that I don't loose my formatting and have to do the work twice.)

Pasting from Word/Office products never ends well.  I finally decided that I spent way too much time troubleshooting all the extra garbage HTML code that Word/Outlook puts into documents, and figured that time would be much better spent just pasting from Notepad and doing the formatting using the WYSIWYG or by hand.  I think I saved a lot of time over the years from that decision.