Replacing Spaces with Underscores... Kills Dashes?

[Calybos]

Our developers have told me that we cannot use spaces in our filename/URLs, so I set the Target option to 'convert reserved characters to underscores.' It worked fine... except that this setting has also converted all my em dashes and quotation marks to a symbol as well!



Any suggestions?

[jbrock]

How many pages are in your project? Are you publishing your help documentation to the web?

If it's a manageable number to change manually, I'd recommend using hypens in file names rather than spaces or underscores. This is especially true if your publishing to the web and would like the content visible to search engines.

[Calybos]

That may be the best option: manually renaming the topics. My developer is all excited about telling me "you can't type text with apostrophes or quotation marks; they're not valid HTML, so you need to replace them with code so browsers will display them correctly."

Oddly, this is only happening now that the "replace special characters" option has been used. The help text appeared just fine up till now.

[Psider]

Regarding apostrophes and quotation marks not being valid html, this is correct if you are talking about curly/smart quotes. If you use the plain old straight quotes, these are perfectly fine to use in html (although I really wouldn't use either in file names as this will cause problems). The one problem might be if your editor is set up to convert straight to smart quotes (like Word does for example).

If you want to use curly/smart then you should use the entity references.

A bit of background if you're interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_ ... _computers

[kwag_myers]

That may be the best option: manually renaming the topics. My developer is all excited about telling me "you can't type text with apostrophes or quotation marks; they're not valid HTML, so you need to replace them with code so browsers will display them correctly."

Oddly, this is only happening now that the "replace special characters" option has been used. The help text appeared just fine up till now.

I'm a little late to the party, but I have a Visual Basic Script I use for just this purpose. I've posted it (along with instructions) here. I use this as a reference.

What I find really strange is that the system has replaced one character with several, e.g., the apostrophe in card's became acirc (â) euro (€) trademark (™).

Just to be clear, you can use special characters in the XML Editor and Flare converts the invalid ones for you. For example, my standard p.Note style has a mc-auto-number-format property of {b}Note: {/b}, but the output source code looks like this:

Code: Select all

<p class="Note" MadCap:autonum="<b>Note: </b>">