I get a lot of Email newsletters and while reading them If I see an article I might want to post here I copy and paste it into a "Word" document. Then when I get here I can copy and paste it into a post. But I always get those annoying "Smart tag" and smily face things or [font], stuff like that. And if I delete them it changes the wording in the post. What gives? How do you avoid that?
As Blackjack said, paste to notepad or, if a long article, open Wordpad as a new TEXT document and paste there. This removes all formatting.
The Smart Tags are strange. Quig has problems with them, I think Sea too. I have never had any issues with them. QS gets them when replying to posts sometimes. I do know it is a Microsoft Office thing and I don't have it on my system. Here's what I just found: full story here: http://alistapart.com/articles/smarttags/
Instead of Microsoft have you thought of using Open Office? I have it on my home computers(4X) and tried to get my company to run it but they won't due to legal issues.
Corel programs are good for code removal. Open up any Word document in WordPerfect, and check out all the hidden codes. I think I like that feature best; I can strip any document down to the letters.
I just used "Wordpad" to copy and paste an article here and it worked fine. I'll use that from now on. Unfortunately I have to stick with MS for work related things.
If you get a chance to try this in Word, go to the Edit menu and select "Paste Special". This will let you choose to paste with RTF, text, html, and unicode. It's fun to try them all, but I usually use plain text -- I wish the default was the same. Using MS products to make web pages [I]can [/I]be a huge waste of bandwidth; I've seen smart tags being used on a web page rarely, but it's mostly copyrighted material. Almost all the modern CMS products are frugal with their markup and use CSS with great results because most developers want their pages to load as quickly as possible. Recent MS products try to "follow the rules" a little closer, and don't include so much superflous code anymore.
