Typographic Loveliness

Thanks for your reply Abhishek.

I got around my typographic problems by exported the Muse site as HTML then fixing the special characters in Dreamweaver CS6.

I'm very new to Muse so was keen to try it out. The Muse intro videos I watched on the Adobe website imply that all anyone has to worry about is the design, layout and content of a site – the application takes care of everything else. So when I cut and paste text from Pages that includes typographers quotes I expected Muse to recognise these and format them correctly. Similarly if I hit [Alt] + [8] on my MacBook Pro keyboard I expected Muse to recognise that I've created a bullet, the same with en and em dashes. It seems a little odd that Muse is being heralded as being brought to us by the same team that created InDesign. That product has exceptional typographic features. If we look at the Character Formatting Controls options, on the InDesign Control Panel, we see buttons which automatically create Bulleted and Numbered lists - so why aren't there similar buttons that generate <ol> and <ul> tagged html in Muse?

I'll certainly consider using Muse to create simple websites for clients in the future, but negative thoughts of PageMill and SiteMill started to creep into my head today. For the time-being Dreamweaver, with its ability to edit code and perform specific tasks like inserting special typographic characters, is the Adobe application that I will continue to open first.

I'm afraid that I have to disagree with your response Zak. I've just created another simple website using the Mac version of Muse. In the footer I've added a copyright notice including the copyright symbol [Alt/Option] + [G]. When I FTP the site from Muse the copyright notices changes and an "Â" character appears before the © symbol. I've found that something similar happens when I use [Alt/Option] + [8] to create bullets. I'm not sure if I've missed trick somewhere, but the whole process of having to export from Muse as HTML in order to fix typographic problems in Dreamweaver is testing to say the least.

The scenario I described above used Muse's built-in FTP upload feature.

Hi. Thanks for responding to my original post.

The typographic problem I was experiencing with Muse - and which still occurs with some ISPs - was rogue characters being generated in-front of copyright symbols, smart quotes and en dashes. My issue wasn't really with how to create characters like the Copyright © symbol - that's an [ALT] + [G] on a Mac keyboard - but how to maintain it's integrity without it the rogue character appearing when uploaded.

I've quickly learnt that there are some Muse sites that I have to export as HTML and then open in Dreamweaver in order to replace any special typographic characters. A "Special Characters" panel in a future release of Muse would certainly be close to the top of my wish-list.

Thrilled that you found a solution that worked for you and thanks for sharing.