Historically, it has been useful – perhaps even necessary – to write marketing copy intended for websites inside word processors for safekeeping. If possible, you should be aiming to write and store your content in WordPress itself.
While saving your content into programs such as Microsoft Word can feel like a more confident exercise, this can lead to problems when copying and pasting that text into the WordPress editor. This is because different word processors use different unicode characters in order to present signs/symbols and even paragraph and letter spacings. Once pasted into the WP editor and then output on your website, you might find some unwanted ‘garbage’ characters or other strange formatting behaviour,
You can use a tool such as https://www.soscisurvey.de/tools/view-chars.php in order to reveal the ‘hidden’ characters that might be playing havoc with your copy. It demonstrates the need to ensure a thorough vetting of your content as it makes its way out of your word processors and onto your website.
In some cases, SMILE’s developers are able to employ useful tricks in order to automatically strip some common unwanted characters before output. However this shouldn’t be taken as a 100% reliable catch-all technique. As of 2020, there are a staggering 143,859 unicode characters in use! Unfortunately, no function exists that can automatically detect and remove them all.
For this reason, we would recommend searching out a ‘dumb’ text editor which can highlight these unwanted characters and enable you to comb through and manually remove them. And if possible, use WordPress! Remember, the Gutenberg editor is there to provide you with a much more natural web-intended copywriting experience, one which completely eliminates the headache described above.