Help with n dashes and quotation marks

[shelleycat1]

I have looked on the forums, but found nothing that works, at least in preview.

I want n dashes, how do I get them. I'm going from word (Alt 0150) to Notepad text (seems to be OK there) to a ? in the preview. How do others do dashes?

Same for single quote marks ', which look like single quote marks in word, look the same in text, then come out as ? in the preview.

If anyone knows the tricks, thanks in advance. (I've tried <code>&#8211;</code> xxx <code>&#8211;</code> and that did not work). Its probably obvious, but I cannot find the answer. I don't want to jar readers with question marks.

 

[SyleusSnow]

Perhaps you mean EM dashes---used to separate certain words from the rest of a sentence. It can replace commas, colons, and parentheses (e.g. "I felt rage rising---pure and unbridled---but took a breath before speaking"). EN dashes are used to show relationship between two words, dates, or numbers (e.g. "the Anglo-Soviet Agreement of 1941").

The most reliable way to insert dashes and other formatting is to use HTML entity codes in your submission: Replace the em dashes in your Word doc with &mdash; the en dashes with &ndash; (the leading ampersand and trailing semicolon are required). A single straight quote or apostrophe doesn't need to be replaced. Fancy quotes ("smart quotes" with different opening and closing characters in Word) both single and double get replaced with the straight quote equivalent.

If you're interested, I have a Word macro that does most of the search and replacing to turn a Word doc into HTML... em dashes, bold, italic and line breaks:

https://syleussnow.wordpress.com/2022/01/21/ms-word-to-html-for-literotica/

 

[shelleycat1]

Thank you, That was very helpful. The macro works, and I modified it to change the n dash (too). Because I am in the UK I now have the problem of deciding whether to stick to UK usage, which is n dash; or using the m dash which is USA usage. The rest of the spelling is UK, so it's probably n dash for me.

I see the dashes appearing in the preview, when I paste it in, but not when I upload a file.

 

[Britva415]

Investigate how to disable Word's "smart quotes."

 

[SyleusSnow]

Thank you, That was very helpful. The macro works, and I modified it to change the n dash (too). Because I am in the UK I now have the problem of deciding whether to stick to UK usage, which is n dash; or using the m dash which is USA usage. The rest of the spelling is UK, so it's probably n dash for me.

I see the dashes appearing in the preview, when I paste it in, but not when I upload a file.

If you mean when you upload the Word doc after running the macro… no. Literotica will still see it as a Word doc, not HTML. To use the macro you have to paste all the converted text in the Word doc into the text box on the submission page.

In most web browsers, the difference between an en dash and a hyphen is so small I doubt readers would notice. But readers don't exactly come to Literotica for the awesome typography

Regardless, I've updated the macro to also replace en dashes, plus replace centered paragraphs. New macro is here: https://syleussnow.wordpress.com/ms-word-to-simple-html-macro/

 

[ElectricBlue]

In most web browsers, the difference between an en dash and a hyphen is so small I doubt readers would notice. But readers don't exactly come to Literotica for the awesome typography.

This ^^^^^. I only ever use a hyphen - like this, or like this: stand-alone.

Quickest way to type, and who cares? Only the over-pedantic - it makes no difference to comprehension.