Your emails may reveal text hidden in Microsoft Word | Hacker News Reader

Your emails may reveal text hidden in Microsoft Word

zdnet.com

21 pointscmulligan19 comments

Unless you really need the formatting, just copy-paste everything as plain ASCII. (This is a standard technique for de-classifying or otherwise releasing classified documents; convert everything into ASCII and then clear that for approval. Cuts down on inadvertent releases of meta-data, hidden text, etc.) Tools like PureText

http://stevemiller.net/puretext/

make copy-pasting as ASCII very quick and easy.

I'd suggest not to use ASCII at all unless you write in a language that doesn't suffer from sudden loss of characters that way.

Moreover, unless you know for a fact that the specific text you're using doesn't have any non-ascii characters. "It's English" doesn't quite cut it: what about façade, coördinate, '✓', or even '£', all of which are non-ascii.

(Of course, I'm assuming that you meant this, so it's not a correction -- I'm just taking the opportunity to explicitly mention it.)

Both "façade" and "coördinate" use orthographs which are not present in the modern English orthography. So they aren't actually "English".

Why don't you tell the New Yorker staff they're not writing English, and see how far you get?

coördinate is so pedantic, I love it :)

I forget where I read it, but some publication in the US uses the "interpunct" to the same effect: co·ordinate.

The editor of one of the magazines MIT publishes insists on "coöperate"...which of course shows up several times in every issue.

Ha, I noticed this too. It's MIT Technology Review. Excellent magazine.

Yeah, that's the one. It's a great magazine, too bad about the editor's fetish for that letter since it's not part of the English orthography. I think it's also used in The New Yorker.

sigh Why can't English speakers just be happy with their language without trying to turn it into Latin or German or something else? It's particularly funny with the word "cooperate", since those editors are insisting on using a Germanic orthograph on a Latin-rooted word. Blegh, whatever. I don't usually care too much about language usage, but for some reason this one kind of gets under my skin.

The diaeresis in this context is not an Umlaut. It has similar roots as on ï which comes from French, I think. While äöü in German are letters with distinct sounds, the diaeresis on vowels in English usage signifies a short pause before that vowel.

Pedantry aside: plain text.

Edit: ObPedantry: mispelled "pedantry".

Thanks for the link. This is great as I've become very reliant on Chrome's Ctrl+Shift+V plain-text pasting and often miss it when I'm in MS Word or similar.

In Word: Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text

Or Ctrl+Alt+V, which is the shortcut for Paste Special.

Or in OS X terminal,

    pbpaste | pbcopy

Part of the issue is that for word, the key to start "hidden text" is CTRL+SHIFT+H [1] and the stupid placement of the CTRL key means that hitting it at the same time you hit shift is not necessarily a "rare" occurrence. So you go to start a line with 'H' and you end up hiding some text instead.

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211982

I'm just mystified as to why someone would type up an email in Word and then copy-and-paste it to Outlook to send. Did I enter a wormhole and end up in 1998 or something?

Probably for the autocorrect options from Word.

Also, for a heavy Word user (writer, journalist), I guess it is normal to write in Word first.

Well, I am a techie and I know how this works behind the scenes and I see it obvious. The system saves what you send but filters what receives, so the display:none or visivility:hidden is ripped out. And thanks god for it, scamers are very creative.

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