I was wondering if anywhere out there there was a script that turns all of the unicode characters into normal characters. I need to copy documents over from word into text edit, and then into an XML document. But whenever i do this all of the apostrophes and quotation marks etc. muck up.
What i really need is something that quickly and easily changes all of these to normal text.
Any ideas?
Loki
All of the Unicode characters? Like…ALL of them? Including the Chinese symbols? The dingbats? The braille pattern glyphs? 
You can try Paul Berkowitz’s improved version of my AsText handler:
on AsText(str)
try
return (text of ((str as string) as record)) as string
on error -- plain text to begin with
return str
end try
end AsText
set plain_text to AsText( unicode_text )
However, the above only works when the characters are Unicode representations of MacRoman characters (I think). Actually, I don’t have the slightest idea how the above Unicode coercion works, so be careful with it.