Community

Until I upgraded to Office 2003, pasting as lines from Word to TextPad gave me plain text documents.

Now, when I paste as lines from a Word document, the pasted text is full of extraneous "?" characters.

Does anyone have a suggestion how to fix this?

Thank you,

mj

Not to use word 2003? ;-)

Any correlation between the ? and the characters on screen in word? Smart quotes may be a culprit. What happens if you paste the same text into notepad?

Also, what font(s) do you use in Word and TextPad?

Some fonts do not have glyphs--I think that's the term--defined for each symbol.

No correlation that I can see with glyphs or anything else as yet.

Just a lot of "?" appear sprinkled throughout the text.

The kicker is that this is only happening in one install - on Windows 2000. It is not happening on Windows XP. Using the same fonts, AFAIK.

Please check that you have selected the same Script for the specific document class that you are using, on both operating systems.

Thank you all for the suggestions and hints. You were on the right track and helped me find the answer.

The answer to the problem of random questions marks when pasting Word documents into word had to do with Word 2003 and the ability to have left-to-right and right-to-left text.

Turning off the option of including right-to-left control characters in cut and paste eliminated the pesky question marks.

-mj

Wow! That was something I wouldn't have thought of. (I don't have Word 2003, so I have an excuse).

In fairness though, it's not Word's fault. Those are valid characters, and as time goes by, more and more applications are going to be able to handle bidirectional text. It's all part of the continuing trend toward internationalization. Directional control characters are Unicode control characters, which (I'm guessing) TP turns into question marks. Unicode rules say they should be present, but invisible.

TextPad does give you a warning about unsupported characters if you try to open a file containing them. I am surprised, however, that it doesn't give the same warning when trying to paste them from the clipboard. In the interim period during which TP doesn't fully support Unicode, maybe a warning that characters are going to be converted to the default replacement character should accompany such pastes?