Special characters and encoding

When I type a special character such as an em-dash in design view (or copy and
paste from Word), it is encoded as [ampersand]mdash. Yet when I select it from
the insert special charcter menu it is encoded as [ampersand]#8212;

Is there any way to make DW always encode special characters as numeric
entities, so I can be nice to Netscape 4 users in keeping with the advice given
at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/emen/ ?

I'm using MX2004 7.01 on Mac OSX, with Latin-1 (iso-8859-1) encoding.

(BTW the problem is worse when I use utf-8 encoding as special characters
often aren't encoded at all. Again is there a way to ensure that they are?)

Thanks

[ampersand]#8212; is the proper HTML ascii value for the em-dash.

But if it is valid or not, you'll have to check for yourself, because I'm too
lazy right now :-)

http://validator.w3.org

I'm not sure if you can tell DMX (or word) to import the proper ascii value,
(perhaps someone else knows) but I do know you can adjust a few things inside
"Code Rewriting" category if you click on "Edit" > "Preferences" within
Dreamweaver.