One tip that has saved me a lot of time: if you have to make changes after saving, you can duplicate the text box and the duplicated box will have converted all the special characters back to the HTML.  This is illogical, but it works.   Why they haven't made fixing this a priority is beyond me.  FWIW, my routine is to edit my newsletter in Word, then use an online character converter ( http://www.charset.org/html-special-characters.php), copy the generated text to TextEdit (because for some reason CC messes up the text if I bring it in directly from the converter), then copy it from TextEdit into the CC template. ... View more

Thanks Jayson. I wasn't expecting an immediate solution, but wanted to add my opinion to the mix. I admittedly don't know the advantage of certain encoding sets over others, but I do know that at least one of your competitors doesn't have this problem. I hope you'll collectively choose to make it a priority. ... View more

Hi there,   I was wondering if Constant Contact has a timeline for changing the current requirement, when pasting text into new newsletters, that "special" characters be coded using HTML numbers (e.g., em-dashes as — or smart apostrophes as &#8217 . This coding process accounts for probably half the time I spend building my weekly newsletter—more if I have to make changes on text that I've saved and CC's interface has subsequently converted.   It's possible that I've misunderstood, and that there is a simple way to include these characters, but if not, I really hope CC is working on a different encoding solution. Em-dashes may be a "special" character according to the ISO-8859-1 encoding set it uses, but they're a basic element of English grammar, and shouldn't require extra work on the user's part to include. Nor should those of us who care about typography be forced to choose between straight quotes and spending extra time coding and proofing smart quotation marks and apostrophes. (Never mind those who are working with accents in foreign languages...)   I asked one of CC's reps about this when I was first trying it out, and she said it was something the company was  planning to address this year. I'm hoping someone there is reading this and can articulate the company's strategy for us. Thanks very much. I have very few complaints about CC, but this one is a potential deal-breaker for me. ... View more