Special Characters

My text has some weird characters in it!

Macintosh and Windows use the same characters for the basic letters, numbers and punctuation, but they don't agree on some of the special characters like curly quotes, ellipses, em bars and accented vowels.

Text that includes special characters will look fine on the original platform, but it will show incorrect characters when you view it on a different platform.

If you are sharing a Goldenseal file between Mac and Windows, avoid use of special characters (on the Mac-- anything for which you hold down the Option key when you type it).

• For quotations, use the "straight" quotes on the regular keyboard instead of "curly" quotes.
• Use three periods instead of an ellipsis.
• Use a hyphen or two hyphens instead of an em bar.
• Don't use accents, umlauts, ligatures and other special characters.

If you copy text from another program and paste it into Goldenseal, you may need to clean up curly quotes or other special characters.

HINT-- most word processers include an option to use "curly" quotes. Turn the option off if you will be using the text on more than one platform.

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