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| 18 Sep '08 - 07:20 | | news source ~ Configuration Manager Writers When Smart Quotes Aren’t Smart – CertReq Error with the New Step-by-Step for Windows Server 2008 CA
Although our documentation is XML-based, we use Microsoft Word as our editor, and Word likes “smart quotes” – which has resulted in a problem for the Copy Code section in our new step-by-step topic for Windows Server 2008 CA. Smart quotation marks are also known as curly (and typographer's or book) quotes, with an example being in the preceding sentence. The text used for the inf file should have used "straight quotation marks", which I’m learning are also known as standard quotes, dumb quotes, typewriter quotes, and even ambidextrous quotes. Amazing how such a small mark can have so many names, and cause so many problems …So what is the problem exactly? Where we have Subject = “CN=The site code of this site server is
When you use smart quotes in the inf file instead of straight quotes, this subtle but important difference results in CertReq displaying a Certificate Request Processor error The string contains an Invalid X500 name attribute key, oid, value or delimiter, 0x80092023 (-2146995597). That error message isn’t terribly helpful in identifying the problem, but if you then open the file again with a text editor such as Notepad (not Word!), you will see that the quotation marks are replaced with strange characters. Simply delete the strange characters and replace them with quotation marks in your text editor, and they will then save as "straight quotes".