Hyphens and elipses in strings

[SilverSpook]

Hi, when I add certain characters into dialog like a hyphen (-) or an elipses (...) the dialog shows strange symbols like squares or bracket-looking things.  Is there a way to just display a hyphen in dialog?

EDIT: Sorry, I figured this out.  It looks like Microsoft Word was automatically turning my double dashes into special character hyphens and elipses into some math character.  Feel free to delete this.

[Snarky]

EDIT: Sorry, I figured this out.  It looks like Microsoft Word was automatically turning my double dashes into special character hyphens and elipses into some math character.  Feel free to delete this.

As a typography geek, let me just pick you up on a couple of things: Word didn't turn your dashes into hyphens, it turned your double hyphens into dashes (en-dashes, IIRC). And it turned your three periods into a special ellipsis character. Because keyboards only have a very basic symbol set, Word and other apps use heuristics to transform certain symbols into more typographically appropriate ones (notably "smart quotes" or "curly quotes"). The heuristic sometimes gets it wrong (for example with words that start with an apostrophe: Word thinks it's an opening single-quote and curls it the wrong way), but that doesn't seem to be the issue here. It's simply that these more advanced symbols aren't supported by AGS.

[SilverSpook]

Ah, interesting.

Yeah, I had the curled-quote issue earlier in the development cycle and changed settings in autocorrect/autoformat so AGS doesn't get confused by them.

The solution was to just turn the autoformatting of double hyphens and ellipses off in Word.

[Khris]

The solution is to not use Word for projects that don't end up as a printout.

[SilverSpook]

Probably right.  It's just easier to organize dialog and story material in Word for me. 

[Monsieur OUXX]

Probably right.  It's just easier to organize dialog and story material in Word for me. 

Consider using intermediate text editors such as Notepad++ (notice the "++" at the end). It's free and veru helpful to avoid screwing up with encoding and such.