Hello, today I replaced Chapters 6 and 9 on my story "Scouting Rounds a Guy Out." The quotation marks are fine on Chapter 9. However, for Chapter 6 all of the quotation marks appeared as symbols instead that look like this: î or like this: ì. Also, all of the apostrophes in contractions are incorrect and came out as: í Thank you for you attention.
This sounds like a text-encoding problem. What are you using to edit your chapters?
MS Word - I saved an existing text file as a new one (called "revised" in the title) and edited that with some changes. I think I've submitted three other revised chapters here over the last couple of years without any issues. Text-encoding: I've been using Word for almost two decades and I never had to know anything about text-encoding. I've been submitting documents for publication on various sites for over four years. Anyway, thanks, I'll look into it further.
However, for Chapter 6 all of the quotation marks appeared as symbols instead that look like this: î or like this: ì. Also, all of the apostrophes in contractions are incorrect and came out as: í Thank you for you attention.
That happens when the submitted text is in Mac Roman encoding and the first bunch of text doesn't have any quotes or apostrophes for us to notice the encoding issue.
It's best to ensure that your text is always encoded as UTF-8.
I appreciate that you fixed it. As indicated in my response to Michael Loucks above, text encoding is above my level of knowledge. I'm trying to find an explanation online for how to do it.
I'm trying to find an explanation online for how to do it.
I also use MS Word, but on a Mac and my file is a .docx not .txt. I save that .docx file as filtered HTML to submit to SOL. I just checked one and the HTML is UTF-8.
If you go to Word and then Preferences and then General, there's a button that says Web Options. If you click on that and then Encoding, there's a "Save this document as:". Mine is "Western European (Macintosh)," but if you click on the drop-down there's a UTF-8 option. I believe this is for the document you're on. But I have no idea what all that means. Maybe it's something to look into.
Yes, thanks, someone I know has described the menu options for preferences. That was the first time I've seen the UTF-8 option. I'm not super-techie, so I'd have to look further into what it means. I have seen other sites where quotation marks and such were not depicted correctly.