Well said, Mikey. I hope you’ll share some insights on how you see this. It’s instructive to all of us who are willing to listen & learn.

Unfortunately, I think anything I would have to say would make a number of people very angry, and I’m not here to fight. But thanks.

From what I’ve seen, you only get jumped on here if you use old talking points that have been roundly disected and proven to not be true. A well-reasoned opinion or observation supported with facts and presented with respect will generally be treated quite fairly… but there surely will be one or two people who will jump on it just because they hate dissent. Be comfroted that we have a lot more reasonable people here than cheerleaders.

Unfortunately the newer the version of Word, the more characters embedded; even porting in/out of RTF and back into Word could produce the same bunch of characters.

There’s another tool I’ve grown to love for this kind of work, especially if I’m gathering content from emails or the internet. I use Performancing with Firefox, has a tab for WYSIWYG and for HTML. I can cut text from any word processing package into a Performancing window, switch to HTML mode and see all the tags. Great for using with blogging and website coding, especially if there are tags you want to keep while stripping only a few.

See Performancing.com

“…I would try to cut and paste the Word text into Notepad so that all hidden tags are stripped out, cut-and-paste the text into Publisher from Notepad, then reformat the text in Publisher…”

Excellent advise !

At one point in the somewhat distant past I spent time answering phone calls about M$Word issues. This copy & paste step was always one suggested. Another is to save the file as an RTF document & then reimport into M$Word which also forces “stray characters” to go away.

Something to remember if you must use M$Word for your documents.

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” – Ansel Adams

Thanks, lolo, I did. Very interesting. Also checked him at astro-software.com. Only wish for a birth time to tighten up details.

Mikey @
265

Mikey, I hear you; I used to be more independent, centrist, still consider myself a fiscal conservative/social liberal-libertarian. But consider the players and the nature of the problem, using this thought exercise: change the party affiliation of the persons in office to something other than Repug, and ask whether there should not still be a furor about an adminstration that fails to consider the will of the people or its economic viability over the long run. Some of us here are now polarized for exactly this reason, because it does not matter what party is currently in power, only that NO party should be permitted to ignore the social contract we call the Constitution. I long for the day when I could seek a third party candidate without fear that any of the first, second or third party would abuse the privilege of serving the people.

LBrowne @ 236

I do. I once saw an extremely annoying person drop an unsequenced deck in a mud puddle. Bliss.

That’s a bit redundant, innit? If they weren’t extremely annoying before that…

Actually, no. It was his deck of cards that was ruined and no one else got splashed. Although it did make him whinier than usual for a few days, so perhaps you have a point…

inmymind’s eye @ 214

Hi all,

This is regarding the image that Christy posted this am of the small child being held by the soldier. Does anyone remember a similar image posted sometime ago ? A standing soldier carrying a small child, a tragic image. I’ve been searching for it, slogged through some of the Iraq posts – but there’re almost 500 of them. I searched using soldier. Anyone remember when around that was or a better method of searching than I’m using.

I’d appreciate some help. Gracias.

i have the pic – how can i get it to you? i’m not too good at technical stuff – should we meeting in gabbly to give me your email?

pic i have isnt the same as the michael yon – it’s a soldier w/ a child asleep on his lap from us air force publication

Unfortunately, I think anything I would have to say would make a number of people very angry, and I’m not here to fight. But thanks.