# \[OT\] Curly Quotes on a Mac

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-curly-quotes-on-a-mac/71654>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [February 22, 2006, 1:48am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-curly-quotes-on-a-mac/71654 "2006-02-22T01:48:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cwd)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2006, 1:48am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-curly-quotes-on-a-mac/71654/1 "2006-02-22T01:48:37Z")

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There’s such a Mac-friendly group here, I thought I might get some  
guidance. I’m happily developing everything on my PowerBook, and loving  
it. Yeah, TextMate is way cool. But all my clients keep sending me copy  
in Microsoft Word format and the curly quotes, ellipses, dashes, etc.  
turn into question marks.

This might be overreaching, but is there some way to open the Word doc,  
Cmd+A/Cmd+C, then pop into TextMate and Cmd+V getting the entities  
(curlies, etc.) straightened out or converted to HTML entities?

Is anyone else experiencing this as a problem? It’s hair-pulling crazy  
but (um) it doesn’t happen on my Windows box.

TIA

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cwd)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2006, 3:18am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-curly-quotes-on-a-mac/71654/2 "2006-02-22T03:18:13Z")

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Just make sure the files are using a proper character set (i.e.  
everything on my computer is done using UTF-8) and the special  
characters should show up fine. I’m sure Word has a function to change  
files’ character set. Use Mac Roman, Mac Western, or UTF-8 and you  
should have no problems.

On 2/21/06, Steve R. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> Is anyone else experiencing this as a problem? It’s hair-pulling crazy

–  
=\> the blog from beyond \<=  
=\> [www.eyeheartzombies.com](http://www.eyeheartzombies.com) \<=

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cwd)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2006, 3:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-curly-quotes-on-a-mac/71654/3 "2006-02-22T03:24:26Z")

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Hi Kenneth

I believe the OP’s problem wasn’t just the display of the entities, but  
converting those to HTML entities like &quo; for example.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cwd)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2006, 8:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-curly-quotes-on-a-mac/71654/4 "2006-02-22T08:20:43Z")

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Yes, this is the “holy grail.” Word takes its locale from two places 1)  
the original document; and 2) the local machine. So far so good, right?  
But the original document most often comes from Windows where the  
document is tagged with a code page that includes some convenient mb  
characters, but not the same ones as Mac Roman. Anyhow, the problem is  
that if I take a client’s Word/Windows document, copy it, and paste it,  
I get a lot of ? characters.

But even if it worked as you might expect and pasted UTF-8 straight  
across, I’d prefer to use HTML entities, as they are almost certain to  
work. I’m surprised nobody else is tripping over this.

Thx

Luke R. wrote:

> Hi Kenneth
> 
> I believe the OP’s problem wasn’t just the display of the entities, but  
> converting those to HTML entities like &quo; for example.