Character entity trouble from CMS systems, MS Word, and Dreamweaver

[Esp68]

All the text content on our website is entered in 2 different ways:

1) I copy and paste text from Microsoft Word documents I receive.

2) People in the communications department enter text in a Content Managment System.

Either way, I have problems with character entities (html special characters).

The problem with the first way (copy from Word and paste to Dreamweaver MX 2004) is that Dreamweaver uses named entities instead of the correct decimal entities. For exemple, Dreamweaver uses œ instead of œ for a small oe ligature. Named entities do not display correctly in NN4x but decimal entities do. Any suggestions on how to avoid that?

What is the best way to ensure that text content will always use decimal entities wether it is entered by hand from Word or in a CMS?

[Ragabash]

Dump NN4 ;) It's always been a problem-riddled browser...

Is there a reasonable limit to the amount of special characters which can be used by the users? If you, you might want to consider a server-side script which translates names to numbers.

[Filipe]

Don't dump browsers.

If you search for 'html ascii converter' (sans quotes) in any search engine, you should find some software that you can use to pre-process the Word/CMS text.

If you know PHP, I would also look into the functions:

htmlspecialchars()
htmlentities()
get_html_translation_table()
and
strtr()

[choster]

This may have changed in the couple of versions of Dreamweaver since mine came out, but in DW4 you could specify which entities get inserted for which characters by editing the appropriate file in the Characters subfolder of the Objects subfolder of Configuration in the program folder.