Fleischer

the MS Word Cleaner for Firefox

Input MSWord text:

convert to HTML with <p> tags convert to HTML convert to plain text remove empty paragraphs do not convert existing tags in the text into &lt; and &gt;

Output:

What does Fleischer do?

Fleischer replaces smart quotes (single and double), em dashes, en dashes, and ellipses with W3C-acceptable alternatives. It outputs HTML or plain ASCII text.
Note: it does not (because it cannot) handle bold, italics, underline, font size, leading, or other font styles.

What it's for

By default, MS Word turns quotes into "smart quotes", double dashes into em-dashes, and three periods into the points-of-ellipses character. This looks great in a Word document, but if you try to paste Word content into a non-Unicode or non-Windows application, those special characters disappear or render as odd symbols. Worse, if you use Word's "Save as HTML", Word leaves them in even though they are not valid HTML entities. Fleischer remedies this by turning these mischief-makers into safe text.

Why is it called Fleischer?

Choose one:

• Fleischer is German for "butcher".
• It's named after someone who took rambling, incoherent nonsense from a big letter W and cleaned it up for the general public.