Limit 'bad' characters in plain text created in TextEdit
[As usual, I have no idea where to post this because the key app, TextEdit, doesn't have a community; suggestions for alternates wecolmed.]
need a way to 'sterilize' text that I'm working on by reducing it to a simpler character set with the least hassle. My workflow requires that I copy and paste several paragraphs to several pages worth of text back and forth between the simplest plain text editor and one of several EMRs in use at my various worksites with notable lack of text editing features.
I use TextEdit as my primary editor for this because it's quick and easy to get plaintext in and out of it. But: some things acceptable to TextEdit are problems when pasted back into the EMR, such as bullets (cause a corruption error and refusal to save the pasted text) and dashes (when I type a dash or paste a dash from an existing paragraph into TextEdit, and paste it back to the EMR, it creates a vertical line of unhappiness instead of a dash.
I still can't get an answer as to what character set is acceptable in my primary EMR (resounding silence from Cerner since my tech support person and I both made the request to provide the details).
I tried to force TextEdit to work with only ASCII characters but while TextEdit offers save as ASCII options, it won't do that if the text already has forbidden characters in it, as it does if I copy/paste abstracts from PubMed.
And while I have had some success in keeping the dash problem at bay (there is a preference setting to prevent auto-dashes from being inserted when I type double hyphens), I have managed to corrupt a different setting that was keeping a minimum of formatting in my plain text as I pasted it; now when I paste, the paragraphs are merged because my paragraph setting is lost.
That is, text in TextEdit documents, set to be plain text, show up in the TextEdit window with paragraph breaks where I put them. I paste into the EMR text box, and it's one continuous paragraph with extra spaces where the paragraphs used to be.
I have a couple of TextEdit files that I saved previously as templates for various standard boilerplate entries, and when I work in those files, I get the normal paragraph-preserving behavior. But I can't find a way to compare the settings/characters etc in a new file vs the older files to figure out what the difference is.
Now I'm stuck. Helpdesk can't help because they only know Windows.
(1) anyone know what setting in TextEdit might be corrupting the paragraphs when I copy/paste?
and
(2) Can I set up a working environment in TextEdit that will identify the non-ASCII characters and replace them with something obvious--like a # sign--at the point of pasting them into a document, and also avoid being able to type nonASCII characters while I'm working on the pasted document, so that I won't have the problem at the end when I'm pasting it back into the EMR that seems too lame to cope with non-ASCII text?
MacBook Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6)
