Update: Problem with single quotes and line wraps in Help files solved!

Subject: Update: Problem with single quotes and line wraps in Help files solved!
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 11:03:50 -0500


A year or so ago, I wrote to techwr-l requesting help with a problem
involving single quotes, line wraps, and a French help file. As you can
imagine, the French file is full of apostrophe's (l', d', etc.), and the
problem I was having is that after compilation, the resulting help file
would let the text wrap after the apostrophe rather than correctly treating
the prefix (e.g., l') as part of the word and wrapping the whole mess.
Nobody came up with a solution at the time, so we just figured this was a
flaw in the help compiler, gritted our teeth, and decided to live with it.

I was playing around today trying to solve the problem while doing some
final tweaks to this year's version of the help file, and found the problem
and solution: Word's curly single quotes (alt-0146) get transformed into
what looks to be the accent grave (as in `) rather than being left as a
quote. Odd. In any event, globally replacing the single curly quotes with
the "foot" symbol (alt-039 = ' = the straight vertical apostrophe) solves
the problem nicely.

Hope that helps someone!

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada

"It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation.
That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father.
Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows
'09."--David Brin, _Kiln People_

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