Not sure if this is the right place, and mainly just curious.
Once in a while I will come across a story and the formatting seems odd. An example it’s(from a story on a different site, just fast to find), instead of it's.
Does anyone know what happens, in easy terms?
I think the very odd story on SOL might have this happen also,but can be mistaken, think it happens mainly on other sites.
It's a text encoding problem with the "smart quotes" that give the curved right/left single and double quotes.
It happens in documents as well as on-line.
https://support.docuware.com/en-us/knowledgebase/article/KBA-36899
Apostrophes replaced with "’" during CSV data import
This behavior occurs when the character used as an apostrophe is a "right single quotation mark" character (').
This is a universal issue with character encodings and is not specific to DocuWare. If you open the CSV in Microsoft Excel, you will see the same result. When opening the CSV file in Excel, the right single quotation mark character is converted into the "’" symbol. DocuWare simply reads the CSV as is. This is because Excel opens the CSV file using the default Windows encoding (Windows-1252); hence, the character is encoded as per the Windows-1252 character set.
See also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/cmhnm/why_you_see_%C3%A2_instead_of_an_apostrophe/
The solution to that, is to ensure you post the story as "charset=utf-8", which is the default on SOL. That way, you don't need to replace ANY characters, as what you type is precisely what you get, and the 'smart quotes, en- and em-dashes and the ellipses are all handled just a plain text would be.
It took me forever to learn this, as I kept insisting on manually doing everything, as that's how I'd always done it. Yet now that I've finally switched over, it's SO MUCH easier than the old way and I'll never willingly go back.
That said, most 'standards' eventually change, so the publishing industry often screws up the old electronic standard periodically. They'll usually fix it, eventually, yet in the interim, ALL of your old stories are suddenly 'no longer acceptable' due to the new and revised standards. And I HATE seeing my entire published works just 'erased' like that.
"charset=utf-8", which is the default on SOL.
Where, and How should a writer set "charset=utf-8" as the standard? On SoL when posting the story? If so, how? Or in Libra Office which I currently use to write my stories?
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Where, and How should a writer set "charset=utf-8" as the standard? On SoL when posting the story? If so, how? Or in Libra Office which I currently use to write my stories?
Unless you're submitting your stories as plain text (.txt) or crafting HTML file manually, then you don't need to worry about it.
Sorry about that, Paladin, as I fit into the later category. But yeah, SOL defaults to UTF-8.
The same kind of thing can happen for basically the same reason with subtitles in movies/TV shows during playback. I see those at times with ü on occasion, as well as the 'smart' quotes.