Preview issue?

[Ed]

Hi,

I've been trying to reply to jeajea's post in this thread

If I hit the "Quote" button, jeajea's message appears in the reply window, but if I then immediately hit "Preview", nothing appears and the reply window becomes blank. I've tried several variations, including copying a single sentence from jeajea's post and "quoting" that single sentence, to no avail. When I then hit "Preview", nothing appears and the window goes blank.

I have posted a reply without previewing it, so reply works fine, but preview doesn't work.

Also, it must be something about this particular post, because I was able to quote, respond, and preview another post just fine.

[mathdon]

Ed, look at the quotation marks he has around the word "internal", in the first sentence of his "Minus" points. They are angled double quotes. He probably wrote it in MS Word and copied it. The preview feature does not like special characters, it seems to be restricted to ASCII. To compose a post elsewhere for copying later, it is better to use Notepad or something similar, not a fully-featured word processor. So nothing wrong with preview, just a known limitation.

[Ed]

Ed, look at the quotation marks he has around the word "internal", in the first sentence of his "Minus" points. They are angled double quotes. He probably wrote it in MS Word and copied it. The preview feature does not like special characters, it seems to be restricted to ASCII. To compose a post elsewhere for copying later, it is better to use Notepad or something similar, not a fully-featured word processor. So nothing wrong with preview, just a known limitation.

OK. Thanks Graham. In one of my iterations trying to make the preview work, I actually tried composing my response, including the tags, in Notepad. I did this by hitting the quote button, then copying the text in the reply window and pasting that text into notepad. Then I added my reply points into Notepad and copied the result from Notepad into the reply window and tried to preview it but it was blank. I thought that the non-ASCII characters would have disappeared when I copied the quoted text into Notepad, but I guess they survived?

Anyway, this is no big deal for me, and thanks for investigating it.

[The Robman]

There were several special characters in that post, I don't know what people do to cause them, are they editing in Word first like Graham suggests or do they have them installed on their PC, I don't know.

It's just the preview that fails, if you hadn't previewed your reply it would have posted.

At any rate, I have edited the original post so that you can quote it now.

[Ed]

There were several special characters in that post, I don't know what people do to cause them, are they editing in Word first like Graham suggests or do they have them installed on their PC, I don't know.

It's just the preview that fails, if you hadn't previewed your reply it would have posted.

At any rate, I have edited the original post so that you can quote it now.

Thanks Rob. I just went ahead and submitted the post without previewing it. I did check this thread and saw the reference to non-ASCII characters, but I didn't see any obvious ones and I thought, incorrectly, that if I put everything into Notepad and then copied it into the reply box, somehow the non-ASCII characters would disappear. In other words, I thought I might have found another issue, which is why I posted here.

I like to use Notepad for responses sometimes, especially if I'm breaking someone else's post into parts to focus my response or responding to multiple people in the same post. It's easier for me to move tags around that way. I'm not certain, though, that Notepad doesn't sneak some "bad" characters in from time to time.

[The Robman]

I used Notepad to edit his text, I had to replace all the double quotes, single quotes (in words like don't) and the dashes.

Here’s a “special” sentence – written using Word
Here's a "special" sentence - written using Notepad