"harry newton" wrote

| Copy the text to your text editor (or if already in a text file, open
the
| file). Select a "curly quote", copy it. Replace all, paste the copied
curly
| into the "find this" box, and then type a regular quote in the "replace
it
| with this" box, replace all. Repeat for the "close curly quotes".
|
| I should have mentioned that the curly quotes are just the tip of the
| iceberg, and even they have "opening" and "closing" curly quotes, and even
| then, they have "single" and "double" curly quotes ... and there's lots
| more of this "curly-quote" stuff, so cutting and pasting isn't even close
| to a solution.
|
| I'm looking for a program that just does away with all non-standard
| "us-ascii" characters that aren't on a typical American US English
| keyboard.
|
I can't see your tinypic links. Apparently they
require script. But I know what you mean. That also
drives me crazy. It's an entirelty unnecessary
complication.
Auric's solution is the most realistic. I know there
are different characters, but usually not many.
Two kinds of curly quotes and unicode white
space are the most common. There's no way to
make a generic program to treat all possibilities
because you're substituting ANSI characters for
UTF-8. The possibilities go into the thousands.
If you just save as ANSI and then replace anything
funky, it's not too bad. Otherwise, you can just save
the text file as UTF-8.

I agree with you. There's no reason to use curly
quotes. Using the ASCII versions means not needing
to use UTF-8 encoding. If UTF-8 were really necessary
it would be different, but most of the world lives by
ANSI. And webpages in European languages work just
fine with ANSI. Microsoft is one of the worst for that
problem. They write pages intended for an English-speaking
audience, in English, then use just a handful of unnecessary
UTF-8 characters that break the ANSI continuity. It makes
no sense.