This is a test of using Microsoft’s “Live Writer” tool as a blog editor. One of my pet peeves with most online content is the incorrect use of typographic symbols—or more typically, not using them. A foot symbol instead of an apostrophe jumps out at me as if it was set with neon green… and don’t get me started on the ugly "straight quotes" instead of the “proper” ones!
But this initial typing looks promising: like Word, Live Writer is converting the straight quotes correctly to apostrophes and typographic quotes—and it also converts the “double hyphen” to a dash as I would hope. But I’ll have to hold off on my enthusiasm until I see how it gets rendered in the blog.
Entering characters like this in HTML has always been a pain. Most word processors do it well now (as long as the correct settings are turned on) but the different “charset” options in HTML are frequently overlooked. Accents have a similar problem: to get “été” I needed to type—awkwardly—the Alt-0233 sequence for the accents. Sadly, the very much smoother “Ctrl-' e” sequence in Word doesn’t work in Live Writer. See my popular tip sheet for the full set of character entry options.
Not bad. I like the Live Writer interface better than the Blogger one—and it certainly manages the quotes and dashes more effectively. Now I’ll see how well it handles copy and paste from Word. Copying into the Blogger interface brings all the underlying Word code with it and interferes with the formatting, so if this works better, I’ll probably switch over to Live Writer.
Excellent! The above paragraph came through looking exactly as intended with the italic and bold set correctly—and when I examined the source, only the appropriate HTML was included. A similar test with the Blogger interface looks okay, but the source includes a bunch of code from the Word source formatting.
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