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Have you ever cut and paste some text into your web page through your WYSIWIG web tool or software program only to find later that there’s some weird and funky formatting or symbols in the text? No it’s not your imagination…word processing programs like Microsoft Word sometimes put hidden code in your text…especially if you’re using formatting like bold, italics, or underlining. If your copy has special symbols like em dashes, ellipses, tildes, accent marks, and copyright symbols, those symbols won’t translate straight to HTML either. Those require use of special ASCII codes in order to show up correctly in your HTML page. The same thing can also happen if you’re cutting and pasting text your web browser as well.

The best way to avoid this problem is before you cut and paste your copy into your web page, is to save your Word document as Text Only (.txt). Then you can open up that text file and cut and paste your text directly in your web page. If you don’t feel like saving the whole document as text, but only have a small portion of the text you wish to cut and paste, you can use Notepad. Simply cut and paste that section of text into an empty Notepad file, then copy and paste that text from your Notepad file into your web page. Notepad is included on all version of Windows…if you’re a Mac user, I suggest you use a text editor like BBEdit or TextEdit as part of your web design toolkit.