On Sat, 26 Jan 2002, Newton, Philip wrote: > (a) using "smart" quotes when illustrating strings in program code > [snip] or (b) using en dashes rather than double hyphens in program > options.
The overzealous helpfulness of Word in this area is infuriating, and it's what made me basically stop using it with Word 97. You have to go though way too many different dialogs to get it to disable all the "that was what you typed but this is what we think you meant" options. Being helpful, even aggressively so, isn't a bad thing, particularly for beginners. But getting in the way is just, well, getting in the way. But then, as I learned in retrospect, you really shouldn't be doing text processing in a word processor, as the typesetting features that all word processors embed can only be a problem. Content first, format later. Following that rule tends to make a lot of things a lot easier... -- Chris Devers "People with machines that think, will in times of crisis, make up stuff and attribute it to me" - "Nikla-nostra-debo"
