Alright, this is probably something that has gotten on my nerves for the longest time with places like FA. I have a story down, I upload it directly with Microsoft Office Word and it doesn’t give me any troubles with the upload. I try experimenting with txt. documents and every form of punctuation isn’t read by the website so i get a bunch of diamond question marks. Going back to the file I uploaded before it suddenly doesn’t recognize the file, so I’m stuck with a messy looking submission. Has anyone worked a way around this?
Convert to ASCII (plain text) format in Microsoft Word. Alternatively, you can copy and paste from .doc or .docx to Notepad. Once you do that, all those diamond question mark thingys disappear.
The behavior is caused by special characters MS Word likes to insert into your documents like “smart quotes” and fractions and the like. I went into my AutoCorrect settings and disabled all that malarkey. I also quit posting stories to FA and put them on SoFurry instead.
If you don’t want to turn off the AutoCorrect, saving the .txt file as UTF-8 will take care of the issue. (In Word, when you save something as .txt, a box should come up titled “File Conversion.” Select the “Other Encoding” button, and then select “Unicode (UTF-8)” from the menu to the right and click OK.)
That did clear it up. I’m not use to how particular it is in file format and it was frustrating me to no end.
Oh, neat, I’ll have to try that. Thanks very much for the info, folks.