Invisible characters

[Dranso]

I recently got an email saying my publication had invisible characters because I used word. So I put it into notepad but still didn't see any of the little rectangles. Now is this because I used notepad instead of textpad? I figured they were basically the same thing.

[Jaenoic]

May I ask, do you live in a non-English speaking country? Often times keyboards and keyboard input will vary from country to country, and it may input in unicode as opposed to ANSI or vice versa. I have had that problem on several occasions, I type in another language and hit save, only to realize later that I saved in the wrong format and now my paper I wrote is just a bunch of rectangles. =(

[Raona]

I believe Notepad can read Word files, and when it does so, it strips out all the magic vodoo characters. Files saved in Notepad are simple text files, with all the whiffle dust stripped out of them. I believe any file saved in the Microsoft Word format (.doc) contains oodles of hidden characters. I believe another potential fix is to save the file from Word as type (DOS) Text - but Notepad is sure-fire.

[Peverell]

Dranso, I had the same problem with my first publication.
I used OpenOffice to check that each line was within the character limit, and while doing some editing some devilish characters crept in: like an automatically reformatted hyphen, which I couldn't spot! When I put the text back into Notepad, those characters remained, invisible to the naked eye, but poisonous for MUDs...

Possibly saving it as a .txt file and re-opening it will strip the "rectangle" characters, but personally I run everything through Textpad to double-check before I submit anything these days

[Zilvryn]

Do it in notepad. Word or Open Office will put "hidden characters" into your documents. The best way I can explain it is like html chars don't get shown by a web browser, but they get shown by notepad. Same with word processors. There's a setting in word that allows you to see what ones you put in, but it's a nightmare to find, and not really worth it tbh. Pretty much any word processor will fill your document with crap, just use notepad, lol.

<shakes his fist at M$>

On a side note, if you really want to see something funny, code a webpage in Frontpage, load it into a webbrowser, then view the source. That'll make you laugh big time, =)

</shakes his fist at M$>

edited for mong punctuation.