[mso] Re: Word2003 Letters & Mailing: Bad Rendering of Some Punctuation

Hi James and Jacki,

Thank you for your replies.

<<I think the solution is to not use such characters. Use plain quotes and 
apostrophes. Use plain hyphens. And use three periods instead of ellipses.>>

In Tools | Autocorrect options, I see how to turn off curly quotes, ordinal 
substitutions, and dashes when creating new documents. I don't see how to turn 
off curly apostrophe, ellipsis, EN and EM spaces etc.

Also, I'm looking for a quick way to convert all these special punctuation 
marks to the straight text equivalent in existing documents. I tried using 
"Plain Text" in the Save as... Save as type drop-down window. Ordinals appear 
as desired. IOW  they are rendered as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Curly quotes, 
apostrophe, ellipses still come across as little empty rectangles.

Two questions:

1. Is it possible to turn off all autocorrections in a template so that only 
documents created with that template will be affected?

2. How to convert existing documents to use all plain-text-equivalent 
punctuation? Search and replace for each special punctuation character would 
be a major pain even if I can get the document to accept the ASCII or Hex code 
for straight quote or straight apostrophe etc.

The need for this kind of conversion arises because about a dozen officers in 
our club use Mail Merge to send email announcements to 150 members, many of 
whom read all emails as plain text.

As Jacki said, "I hate those things". I know I'm not the only person who would 
use a solution to this problem.

Thanks for the help.

Ray Shapp


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