On Sun, Feb 07, 1999 at 09:23:18PM -0800, Adrian Tymes wrote:

Sean Connor wrote:

A note to all writers using Microsoft Word, and possibly Wordpad, to
write: Disable SmartQuotes.  They are evil.

It's not a problem in Wordpad.  Just make sure you're editing a text
(not Rich Text, and *definitely* not Word) document.  Save as, close,
and re-open if you're not sure.

Ummm...  nope.  Check out http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoronizer
for a full explanation of the problem.

That said, I don't know if Wordpad supports SmartQuotes or not.  I do
99.9% of my work/play on a Linux machine.  I do have a Win95 box (used
mainly to play CivII :), but it's currently on the fritz, so I can't 
check if it does or not.

Get thee to a grammar book and learn the difference between a hyphen
and a dash. :)

It's the same ASCII character.

Yes, but there's two of them if it's a dash. :)

I gave up trying to enforce a difference
between the two in my conversations years ago.

You don't generally have to worry about them in conversations. :)

Anyways, I knew what the problem was as soon as I saw it, and e-mailed the
author telling him how to fix it.  I see that a reformatted version has
now appeared.

And it has, apparently, fixed the problem.  (I still think " - " is
better than "--", but that's merely a personal style issue.)

I would agree.  Personally, I use ' -- '.  However, every grammar book I've
seen says not to use spaces, so I can't exactly condemn the practice.

IMHO, using spaces improves readability.  

-- 
  -Sean Connor  (sec@konatsu.ml.org)
                (sec@cableregina.com)         ,,,,
                (sec@softhome.net)        ,-^^,--/
                                  _--_  .' ,-'  /    ()
                              *,,'    '/  /--------------.
   O]=========================| >     <> (           (o)  )
                              *'`,    ,\  \--------------'
                                  ^--^  '. '-,  \
                                          '-__'--\
                                              ````