The “Smart quotes” feature in Microsoft Office transforms straight quotes into curly quotes. It also transforms hyphens into em-dashes and three periods into ellipses. While one might think, “How lovely! My document looks almost as if I’m educated!” readers of said document may not. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided to assign special characters such as the ones I just mentioned to a range of codes above 128. Problem: these codes were already assigned to other characters, resulting in frustrating incompatibility with non-Microsoft systems. This plugin runs when you create or edit an article and strips curly quotes, em-dashes, and ellipses from the title and article text, and replaces them with straight quotes, hyphens, and periods.
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Strip Smart Quotes