General ⇒ Possessive apostrophe problem

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This is probably a newbie question, so I apologize to the experienced people.

I am having a problem in getting a possessive apostrophe to appear after compiling. Here are my steps that lead to the problem.
1. I am using MS Word as my text editor (because I am using Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice dictation software and it works better in Word).
2. My file is saved in Word as a plain text file and saved named with a .tex file extension. I have also encoded the text various ways trying to fix the problem to no avail (i.e., US-ASCII, unicode, MS-DOS, Latin 3 and 9).
3. I compile the file using WinEDT by using /input and a wrap file that looks at the .tex file with my material.
4. After compiling, I view the document as dvi and pdf. Everything looks fine except the possessive apostrophe does not appear correctly. It appears either as a question mark or it does not appear at all, depending on how I encoded the characters in Word.

What is going on? Thank you.

[frabjous]

It might help if you uploaded one of the problematic files here.

Are you adding a line to the .tex code to use the right input encoding, e.g., something like:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

for Unicode?

(See the inputenc documentation for more choices.)

You should also see whether or not Word is doing "smart quote" substitution, and try turning it off if need be.

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Thank you. {inputenc} was the problem for me.

However, I have a related issue now after using
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Now, I am getting a couple of error messages that seem to be related to encoding (although I might be wrong about this).

Attached is a simple file that gives me two errors.
Background: I created the .tex file in MS Word 2007 and encoded the text file as utf-8.
After compiling in WinEDT, I get two errors--although I can still create a dvi but with a blank page 1.
1. The first error I get is at \documentclass. It seems to be seeing two characters (garble) **before** '\documentclass'.
2. The second error may be related to the first. The error is 'LaTex Error: Missing \beginning{document}'. I believe it may be seeing the two garbage characters.

Ideas for a solution for the two error messages? Thanks.

[frabjous]

Yeah, there are two weird characters at the beginning of the file; I'm not even sure they're even proper UTF-8 characters. Once they're removed, the file compiles fine. I'd guess the problem has something to do with Word's plain text export routine, at least with Unicode encoding. I'm afraid I don't know anything about Word; perhaps someone else will have a suggestion.

Do you get the same problem if you copy and paste right from Word into WinEDT, rather than using \input ?

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No, when I copied and pasted from Word into WinEDT, the errors did not occur. Strange.

Question: How did you 'remove' the two characters? I can't see them except in the error report after compiling.

[frabjous]

They weren't visible in my editor either, but I could tell they were there because it would take multiple presses of the arrow right key to get past the opening \. Hitting left arrow once more to get in between them and the \, I just hit backspace a few times.

That was with the gedit editor for linux. I don't use Windows, so I don't know whether or not that would work in WinEDT.

At least I think that's what I did. I don't really remember. Let me double check that that works. (Hmmm, seems to work with gedit, but not TeXworks. Not sure if it'll work with WinEDIT, but copy and paste should, perhaps even copy and paste from inside WinEDT into a new WinEDIT document.)

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Follow up information.
The extra characters at the beginning seem to be appended by MS Word as a Byte Order Mark when it encodes text files as UTF-8. Unfortunately, the BOM doesn't seem to work well with WinEDT as described above. I guess that I could try encoding the text in Word as something other than UTF-8 but I haven't tried that yet.