

Your emails may reveal text hidden in Microsoft Word - cmulligan
http://www.zdnet.com/watch-out-your-emails-may-reveal-text-hidden-in-microsoft-word-7000025845/

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jessriedel
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/](http://stevemiller.net/puretext/)

make copy-pasting as ASCII very quick and easy.

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ygra
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.

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hdevalence
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.)

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

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

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ChuckMcM
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](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211982)

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mark212
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?

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AlexeyBrin
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.

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mcosta
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.

