[thelist] Movabletype / Character encodings Problem

Thu Oct 28 16:25:13 CDT 2004

I am having some problems with moving content between MS Word and MovableType - when I copy and paste from Word into MovableType, strange characters get transferred to the "published" versions.  

For example,
when I go to post this,
----------------------------
"... is a complicated issue and one that often causes people’s eyes
to glaze over ..." 
----------------------------

I get this,
----------------------------
"... is a complicated issue and one that often causes peopleâ€™s eyes
to glaze over ..."
----------------------------

You can see a live version here: http://policy.temp.lexi.net/issues/education/weblog/

This appears to be a problem with the Character encodings, but if you look at my <head> tags, you see this,

<code>

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Education Policy Weblog</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
... 

</code>

So when I try to view this site in IE or Firefox, I get the strange characters (â€™, etc), but if I go up to "View" and select "Character Encoding" in the browsers, and manually select Unicode (UTF-8), everything comes up fine.  Shouldn't the browser do this automatically because I stated the charset in between the <head> tags?

Also, when I select "preview" post in Movabletype, the post displays fine, with no strange characters appearing.  It's only after publishing the post does everything go wrong.

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong here?

Cheers,

Greg Farries
Project Manager
http://mapleleafweb.com
Phone: 403.329.2286
Fax: 403.382.7148
Email: greg at mapleleafweb.com
--------------
Canada's Premier Political Education Website