Why all the ??? in my post?
 

Why did I end up with all those question marks in my previous post? And, how do I eliminate them next time? Thanks in advance to whoever answers this.

The Fodors program can't deal with special symbols in some fonts, nor with double-quotes from MSWord. Once in a while, it forgets how to do foreign currency symbols, but then it comes back again. The only sure way to avoid the "?" is to not use those characters.

Did you "cut and paste" from another program, like Word? Sometimes this produces funny things as in your case, where your apostrophes became question marks.

I've been told that when postings are written in MS Word and then pasted into a posting here, that the punctuation marks don't translate for some reason.
If you didn't type your response in Word first, then I have no idea.

Yes, That's exactly what I did--type first in MS word, then copy and paste. I thought I would use spellcheck so my posts would be more accurate. Guess I won't do that anymore. Fodors doesn't have spellcheck, right? Thanks to all.

Hi Kathleen,

Fodors doesn't have spell check, but you can preview your post and remove all of the ? if you want to.

Good. I'll do this and spare all of you the annoying typos.

Another option is:

* Copy from Word
* Open Wordpad or Notepad (Start, programs, accessories)
* Paste, highlight all, and copy again (CTRL+V, CTRL+A, CTRL+C)
* Paste into Fodors.

May sound like a lot of steps but once you've done it a couple of times it's pretty easy. It removes all formatting commands and tricky font stuff from Word - I have to use it all the time for the website software we use at work.

:)

Here's what I do: Tools>AutoCorrect. I select the tab "AutoFormat As You Type" and deselect "Smart quotes" and "Symbol characters". Then if later I decide that I do want those goodies, I just go to Format>AutoFormat>OK and I get curly quotes and dashes.

But I'll try the notepad deal since there doesn't seem to be anyway to undo a format once it's there in MS.

I learned this from someone else on this board. After Word makes the curly quotes you can type control-z and it will "undo" the special character conversion. Not too good if you type a lot of quotes, but certainly acceptable otherwise.

Indy, works for quotes, but not for dashes, and I'm a dash and parentheses nut! I'm not sure I want to stop and do that all the time (and not sure I realize every time I use an apostrophe). But that is great to know for those times that I want to use the quote symbol for feet and inches in a normal document--thank you!

Andrea, I guess Macs don't have notepads because copy-paste-copy didn't work when I used the stickies.

This "cut and paste" option works for me:
Using Outlook Express , I type my message onto a blank e-mail and then cut and paste the message into the Fodors' text box.
So far < knocking on wood here> this trick has squelched all those mysterious ????'s

That's a good idea, Starspinner. I'll try that, too.