Pasting from HTML

[Rich W.]

I have a user who, when she copies text from an email and pastes it into Word
(2003), she gets little circles in certain spots – usually after a period and
a space, but sometimes in the middle of a sentence as well. It’s not every
space in the copied text – just some of them. Her default font in Word is
Times New Roman, and the examples she’s shown me are the same font in the
emails.

The little circles show up when she prints the Word document, so she has to
go back and remove them all manually.

It’s almost like Word is interpreting a CR/LF character and putting in these
little circles where it thinks it sees one. I did a Paste Special, and
selected Formatted Text (RTF) and that worked fine – no little circles. It
seems when the pasted text is pasted as the HTML format is when they show up.
She's happy with the work around.

But, I'm wondering what's going on here?

Thanks for any info . . .

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The circles represent nonbreaking spaces and result from the user spacing
twice after a period. Because HTML ignores extra spaces unless they're
nonbreaking, the mail client converts excess spaces into nonbreaking ones.

But they should *not* print, as they are still nonprinting characters. I
would be very interested to see a document in which these spaces actually
print (other than as spaces). If a person had replaced the spaces with
degree symbols (which is the symbol used to represent them), then I could
believe it; otherwise, I'm skeptical.