pasting in notepad to html - formatting of apostrophe,quote,dashes

[irishdragon]

I am a very basic HTML user. When I write essays in Microsoft Word and paste them into HTML, adding all the <p> tags after every paragraph, certain characters, like apostrophe (') and quote (") get screwed up. Also dashes with spaces before and after ( - ). I even tried pasting the text into Notepad first, to clean out all the crappy characters. Nothing works. When I look at it after pasting it into the HTML editor, those characters are screwed up, usually looking like question marks (?)

What's the problem? Is there an easy way to fix it - besides going into the HTML editor and fixing every screwed up character, trying to remember what is was supposed to be? This is tedious and error-prone.

Any suggestions on how to paste the docments into HTML?

Thanks!

 

[trollacious]

Turn off Word's "smart quotes".

To turn this feature on or off:

On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect, and then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.


Under Replace as you type, select or clear the "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box.
Note You can find and replace all instances of single or double curly quotes with straight quotes in your document. To do this, clear the "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box on the AutoFormat As You Type tab. On the Edit menu, click Replace. In both the Find what and Replace with boxes, type ' or ", and then click Find Next or Replace All.

Lee