New Mac - New Editor - Strange Characters on Webpage

[Charlie-Burt]

Just got my wife a new mac and new HTML editor to work on her site. I'm noticing strange characters showing up on quite a few of her pages.

Example: A' word A'

So I went and changed the font in TextEdit to Arial and also changed the format from Rich Text to Plain Text and changed the font in her HTML editor (Taco) to Arial also. I'm assuming this may have been the problem.

I tried re-uploading one of the affected pages and it didn't fix the problem...could someone look at this page..http://www.decorating-country-home.com/lightingideas.html

As you can see in the first paragraph the A'thatA'. I checked this page in her editor and can't find any reason for this..Also the character set is charset=iso-8859-1 on all her pages..although only certain pages are affected...

Thanks,
Charlie-Burt

 

[angelwatt]

I'd recommend never opening a HTML file in TextEdit, stick to the TacoHTML editor. It does look to be a encoding issue. From TacoHTML show the text correctly? If not, I suggest deletion that portion of text and retyping it in. Just to be sure. As for encodings, the one it has is fine, but I use UTF-8 on all my documents anymore, which I find can have better support these days. I also use Japanese and English together so I have to use it.

 

[Charlie-Burt]

Strange going-ons. I rewrote the sentence and re-uploaded, all that happened was the 'A symbol moved to the end of the sentence. I had to actually remove the sentence to make the symbol go away.

 

[angelwatt]

Here's another solution I think will work. Get TextWrangler (free) and open the file. From the Text menu choose the Zap Gremlins option. I copied and pasted code from the page and tried it and it fixed the code so I think it should work for you. I can't remember if Taco has a similar feature.

 

[Charlie-Burt]

So would you recommend textwrangler over using textedit. I know my wife works on alot of documents in textedit and then moves them into Taco.

 

[Cromulent]

So would you recommend textwrangler over using textedit. I know my wife works on alot of documents in textedit and then moves them into Taco.

TextEdit should be OK as long as you remember to use the "Make Plain Text" option in the Format menu.

I wouldn't really recommend it though.

 

[Charlie-Burt]

I just noticed the encoding in TextEdit was/is set to UTF-8 and my wifes character set is charset=iso-8859-1 on all her template pages. Is this somehow conflicting?

When I view the affected pages with the strange symbols in Taco, nothing shows in the code, but the symbols are visible on the page and page source. This is making my head hurt....

 

[angelwatt]

TextEdit really wasn't meant for coding. TextWrangler gives you color coding of the syntax, better features, and is much better for coding.

Using TextEdit in utf-8 mode and the HTML document declaring a different one could cause a problem.

 

[Charlie-Burt]

Thanks for all the help. I'll keep working on this problem.