I’ve been banging my head against a couple of problems with the interaction between Subtext and Windows Live Writer that I thought I’d post on this here blog in the hopes that someone can help.

I expect that Mr. Hanselman might know the answer, but will only tell me after properly extolling DasBlog’s superiority over Subtext first. Very well.

Here’s the first issue. I’m kind of a fan of typography and go through the extra effort to use proper apostrophes and quotes.

For example. Instead of using ’ for a quote, I will use ’. Instead of “quotes”, I will use “real quotes”. It’s just how I roll.

For the apostrophe, I use the HTML entity code ’. For quotes I use the opening quotes “ followed by the closing quotes ”.

However, when you enter these things in WLW and post them to your blog, it converts them to the actual characters. Thus when I query my database, I see “quotes” instead of “quotes” as I would expect.

I wish WLW would not screw around with these conversionsn, but until then, I was thinking about doing a simple conversion on the server back to the original entity encodings.

However, I can’t just call the HttpUtility.HtmlEncode method as that would encode the angle brackets et all. I still want the HTML as HTML, I just want the special characters to remain entity encoded.

Anyone have a clever method for doing this, or will I need to brute force this sucker?