Vanity: Can Someone Address the Quotation Mark Problem?

Frustration ^ | 11/09/15 | Self

[Yaelle]

It is as if Free Republic were typed on a typewriter missing an important letter. It hurts the eyes and is hard to read. Has it been addressed? Is it difficult to fix?

What up with that?

[Yaelle]

A lot of people, including me, like to whip their eyes down articles and threads, and this really slows us down. Can we fix this problem?

[Mariner]

Pinging Jim as I have the same problem with every post.

Maybe a Firefox issue?

[LostInBayport]

I have found that when I preview my post to a thread, the weird symbols pop up. I retype the quotation marks or whatever has been altered in the preview window and when I preview it again, they are correct and the post comes out perfect (typeface-wise; the content is usually complete crap).

[Yaelle]

I don’t think it is Firefox because I’m on an iPad.

Is there some browser or hardware where this mess does not occur? I’ve seem people complaining about it on threads and I haven’t heard it is limited to one form of viewing FR.

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

Read posts “in context” while JimRob and JohnRob continue to work on this.

Only apostophes, right/left quotes are affected. Even while thread-scanning (thank you Evelyn Wood), it hasn’t been that difficult for most of us.

[Balding_Eagle]

I’ll try that.

[FourtySeven]

From what I know the admins (and of course Jim) are aware of this issue. It seems to be something on FR’s side software related. I don’t know I’m not an expert. But they are aware of it. It seemed to happen right after that thing with Google blocking FR as a “possible malware site”. Who knows.

[frankenMonkey]

What Yaelle said...

You need to replace the characters in the post box when you cut and paste text into it. The bad characters include single and double quotes, and others.

[Yaelle]

Lol! I’m sure your content is novel and thoroughly fascinating. :)

It even occurs in the original articles, making it so hard to read them. It seems anytime anything is quoted, FR doesn’t pick up the quotation symbols like it used to. Wonder why.

[Paladin2]

FR proprietary software was updated recently. This is apparently a new “feature”. The only solution is to contribute more $$$ and wait.

[Yaelle]

Well, if most of you don’t mind it, I guess I’m the only one who has a very hard time. It is very jarring and I tend to just not read those lines. I wouldn’t want to read if we all left out the letter S everywhere either.

Glad to hear they are working on it.

[Old Sarge]

Vanity: Can Someone Address the Quotation Mark Problem?

Can we quote you on that?

[Yaelle]

I’m not actually sure you can!

[Swordmaker]

found that when I preview my post to a thread, the weird symbols pop up. I retype the quotation marks or whatever has been altered in the preview window and when I preview it again, they are correct and the post comes out perfect (typeface-wise; the content is usually complete crap).

FR is no longer able to handle italic quotation marks, apostrophes, em dashes of any type, and any higher level ASCII characters in any browser, it seems. This occurred after Google claimed that FR was a malicious website, but that may have been a coincidence.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

It’s not FR. You copy source has salted the content with unreadable characters to prevent what you are doing. Little binary values other than x020 (Space).

Paste your content into notepad and see what shows up.

[The Sons of Liberty]

I used to encounter this problem only when I ran a spellcheck on a pending post.
Now it seems to be present all the time on all posts when using any of the mainstream browsers - Firefox, Chrome, MS Edge.

[Mr. K]

I am not seeing it on Google Chrome

[Steely Tom]

The quotation mark problem occurs with left- and right-hand quotation marks (curly quotes), not with the normal type on most keyboards.

"Enclosed in straight quotations"
“enclosed in curly quotations.”

I think most - if not all - of the problem occurs when people cut and paste material from other websites. Quoted material you type in won't have the problem.

[timestax]

ping

[McGruff]

Apparently it has something to do with “smart quotes”:

You can use this online tool to replace smart quotes with regular straight quotes.

http://dan.hersam.com/tools/smart-quotes.html