No, I'm not talking about the strange characters who hang out around triathlons. I'm talking about the strange characters that were making my chapters hard to read on some Web browsers.
I've been writing Transition in Word, and the process of converting Word documents to Web pages is awkward, at best. I thought that I had ironed out all of the idiosyncrasies of that conversion process, but...
You see those three little dots at the end of the last paragraph? As most of you probably know, that's called an "ellipsis." There's no way to type an ellipsis on your keyboard (as far as I know), but when you type three periods in a row into Word, it converts those periods into an ellipsis. (I believe you can configure Word so it doesn't do that, but I also think that that's Word's default behavior.) The problem is that the ellipsis is not a "standard" computer character, it's one that Microsoft invented just for Word. As long as you're looking at it via Word, it looks like three dots. But if you look at it through a Web browser, it might look like three dots, or it might look like some kind of strange squiggle. And trying to read a story with a lot of interspersed squiggles can be somewhat distracting.
So, you ask: How did I manage to post a dozen chapters to the Web without noticing that they were squiggle-laden? Didn't I even look at them through a Web browser to see if they were readable?
Well, yes I did. But the browser I chose to view my work was Internet Explorer (IE) – which, like Word, happens to be a Microsoft product. It also happens to be the browser that most people use, since it comes standard on most computers (despite the best efforts of the US Department of Justice, but that's another story). Microsoft has programmed IE so that it recognizes a Word ellipsis, and displays it as three dots, rather than as a squiggle.
But even though most people use IE as their Web browser, some people do not. And even though some non-Microsoft companies have programmed their browsers to recognize Word ellipses as such, some have not. And so a few people have been kind enough to write to me to point out that, as much as they would have liked to read my novel, they have been unable to fight their way through a forest of squiggles. Since I want as many people as possible to be able to read Transition (which is, of course, why I'm posting it on the Web), I appreciate the feedback, and I've gone back and un-squiggified the text. (At least, I think I have – please let me know if your continue to have problems reading it. Thanks!)
By the way, the problem isn't confined to ellipses, I was just using that as an example. Word also uses "curly quotes," which are quotation marks that curl into the text before and after a quotation. Personally, I think these curly quotes look better than "straight" quotation marks – but the straight quotes are standard characters, the curly quotes are Microsoft creations. And, like ellipses, curly quotes display as squiggles on some browsers. And since quotations permeate nearly every page of Transition, squiggles surrounding every quotation have made the text nearly impossible for some people to read.
The same problem exists for apostrophes and "single quotes" (which are "curly" in Word, but not as standard computer characters) and for dashes (which pose a slightly different problem, which I won't get into here). And I suppose that it's possible that the same problem exists for other characters as well, which I won't know about until one of you writes to tell me that you can't read my book because of all the damn squiggles...
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Do you see characters or "squiggles"?
It depends on your browser.
