Why Pasting Special Characters is a Bad Idea

Example of Using Special Characters

It’s so much easier to paste special characters right from a character map like both Windows and Macintosh have. But if you do that on web pages, you will end up with strange characters where your pasted characters were.

Here are some examples:

rŽsumŽ—I copied this accented e from the character map on a Macintosh.

résumé—I converted the accented e to é.

résumé—I converted the accented e to the numeric value: é.

Return to the Using Non-English Letters article.