This is a problem that I have seen in a number of feeds and e-newsletters that I receive: the “” instead of extra space and “’” instead of slanted quote. I believe it has something to do with character set encoding (UTF and the like), but I have not found a clear answer.
Here is an example. A WordPress post that has a text line that appears on the web site like:
I received the html-formatted email from Feedburner as follows:
When I look at the html source, I see:
The code is in a <p> with a couple of <div> tags – nothing unusual. The document type is XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and the meta tags are:
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” dir=”ltr” lang=”en-US”>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />
The obvious work-around that suggests itelf:
- avoid having 2 spaces in a row after a period between sentences
- replace slanted quotes (left and right) with straight quotes
- replace slanted apostrophes with straight apostrophes
If the article is being composed on Word (for example) this means that the auto-format option to “replace straight quotes with smart quotes” should be disabled. In fact most of the auto-format options should be disabled, but that’s a question for another post.
In the meantime, I will investigate this issue to see if there is a better solution.