The combination of MS Word and the ITRC makes for some interesting displays. It doesn't help that when you paste it, things look ok. If you don't preview, you won't see the problem.
Having had post lost due to the ITRC forums going offline, I generally edit offline and paste into the ITRC. And I try to run this through a spelling checker before pasting.
Here's what seems to work for people using Windows.
Download a program like Metapad that will convert the slanted quotes to standard quotes. Metapad is a free notepad replacement that has other uses as well, for example it can convert text to and from cr-lf terminated lines (DOS) to lf only (Unix) format.
If you have used Word to compose or spell check, select all the text (Cntrl-A) copy to clipboard (Cntrl-C), open Metapad and paste the text there. The text will be "coerced" into ASCII, so things like quotes will be displayed correctly. Once in metapad, select it all again, copy to clipboard and paste into the ITRC.
If I remember to do these steps, the posts look as good as is possible with the fonts that the ITRC uses.
Here's a example entered in Word, and pasted directly here, followed by the same line first pasted to metapad, then recopied and pasted to the ITRC.
Copied directly from Word
$ write sys$output â This is from â â mswordâ â
The same line after pasting into metapad and recopying to clipboard before pasting into ITRC follows:
$ write sys$output "This is from ''msword'"
I don't understand why the ITRC software can't do this conversion itself. There seems to be no advantage to the way it gets displayed, because you can't cut and paste it back into Word to restore it to its original form.
it depends
