Question marks in my newsletter

[smartadmin]

Q: When I send out our newsletter, there are a lot of question marks in it. What is happening and how do I prevent it?

A: This results from pasting content from a program like Word that uses smart quotes and other non-standard characters. Normally when you type a quote mark or apostrophe, the marks are vertical. But Word replaces them with marks angled to the right or left depending if they’re at the beginning or end of sentence and other factors. They call them smart quotes. Same with apostrophes, ellipses (…), en dashes ( –, sometimes replaced when typing a single hyphen) and em dashes ( —, replaced when typing a double hyphen).

Our newsletter program is currently incompatible with those characters. This is in our list to address but the timeframe is currently unknown. For now there are three ways to avoid this problem.
1. Type the content directly into the newsletter editor. This is the simplest way to avoid the problem.
2. Turn off auto-formatting in Word—replacing straight quotes with smart quotes, hyphens with dash, three periods with ellipses. Simple, but you will want to turn it back on for regular documents.
3. After pasting the content from Word (always use the Paste Plain Text button to do so), replace the incompatible characters with regular ones. So for a smart quote (and you would need to do it both for the left and right angled ones):
a. Highlight and copy a smart quote (ctrl+c).
b. Open the Find dialog (ctrl+f).
c. Click the Replace tab.
d. Paste the smart quote in the Find field (ctrl+v).
e. Tab to the Replace with field and type a regular quote.
f. Click Replace All and click OK on the dialog that appears.
g. Click OK.
h. Repeat these steps for em dashes, elipses, en dashes, and apostrophes.