Sanitizing Text from Word Documents

Question

When I collaborate with other individuals, I generally receive text to be typeset in the form of a word document. However, it seems that there are almost always characters that, when I copy and paste - for lack of a better word, "bugger up" pdflatex.

Is there a way to sanitize these special characters and replace them with their plain text cognates?

’ with ', double-spaces with space, and so on.

Note: I could very well be referring to an issue associated with encoding, but I don't understand that - and neither will my collaborators.

PS: No idea what tag is relevant here, so please do so appropriately should you have the ability to do so.

Answer 1

A summary of the comments, in order of ease of use:

• \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
• Open in OpenOffice Writer, use writer2latex plugin
• Use antiword and then pandoc to convert to tex.
• Use sed to find replace encoded characters