I copy and paste a lot of text from web pages via Firefox.
The diacritical marks don't always transfer, and I see many because what I'm doing involves a lot of foreign names. I'd like to figure out what's involved here. I'm thinking of factors like text encoding, fonts, html code, and how certain programs interpret the copied text.
I do most of my writing in Tom Bender's Tex-Edit Plus, which has some really nice features, esp. its text cleanup, but it can't read diacriticals very well, hardly at all. This is what I'd like to correct.
Some other examples. Text Wrangler 3.5.3 does transfer the text with diacritical marks exactly, but without other html formatting, which I like. Pages and Tex-edit transfer all html formatting, which of course includes the diacriticals. So these programs are obviously doing something that Tex-Edit Plus isn't or can't. Maybe there's a preference, tweak, or action that will allow me to paste into TE Plus without losing all the formatting. I don't mind losing some. I don't want the html code to transfer, just the diacriticals.
Interestingly, I can copy-paste into Text Wrangler then copy-paste the same text into TE Plus and many, but not all, of the diacriticals transfer properly. Of course, I wouldn't want to add that step to my workflow, which is already full of tedious, repetitive tasks: copy, paste, text clean up, search and replace. I've been trying to figure out grep searches but have been unable to. There ought to be a way to use Applescript or Automator to handle those tasks. A way that I can figure out, that's another matter.
Regardless, this is a subject I've been wondering about for a long time. It isn't typing diacritical marks that's a problem. It's transferring them from one place to another.
