Paul Tram wrote:
On Mon, 16 May 2005, Joe Fenton wrote:
Here is a sample of how it came out on my end...
-=-=-=-=-=-
^�We^�ll be arriving at the Academy in a few minutes.^�
At the shuttlecraft pilot^�s announcement, half of the
-=-=-=-=-=-
For me, it was
“We’ll be arriving at the Academy in a few minutes.”
At the shuttlecraft pilot’s announcement, half of the
I don't know how the above looks to you, but to me the quotation marks
(while visibly smart quotes now that I look at them closely) do not
display as the same thing as the example above.
That's not smart quotes, it's the character set. You're probably in
ISO-8859-1 mode while this is UTF-8. UTF-8 is slowly becoming the
character set of choice. All major linux distros now set UTF-8 as
the default. Windows has been UTF-8 since W2K. Switch the character
encoding in the view menu of your emailer. In Thunderbird, it's
view->Character encoding->Unicode (UTF-8)
If you are in UTF-8, then try switching to Western (ISO-8859-1) and
see if that looks better.
I don't think it is the character set. The email program I am using
was indeed set to ISO-8859-1 but even changing it to UTF-8 had no
effect. Besides, I have been able to read just about every other
email and/or fanfic on this list perfectly well.
Actually, it's a mix of both. On my own system (which usally *does* have
a problem with smart quotes), the original message is detected as UTF-8
and the quotes display fine; if I change over to the Western encoding
described, they appear as question marks. On the other hand, the latter
two messages are detected as Western and UTF-8 respectively, and in both
cases the quotes (or rather the garbage characters which have replaced
them) display incorrectly.
IOW: On a properly configured system, if you have a sufficiently
comprehensive set of fonts installed, when viewing as UTF-8 you should
be able to see the quotes correctly. On the other hand, they *are*
indeed smart quotes, and as such will not be viewable properly by all
basic plaintext viewers; I believe that list policy says they should be
avoided.
Dave, since you seem to have been a bit unsure as to what smart quotes
were: they are a 'feature' of some fonts and more-advanced text editors,
such that the quotation mark - whether single or double - at the
beginning of a quote curls to the right (towards the quote) and the
quotation mark at the end of it curls to the left (also towards the
quote), rather than both forms looking identical. They were indeed
present in your posted chapter; how they came to be there I don't know,
since I don't know the exact procedure of how you wrote the chapter and
how you converted it to plain text before posting, but although they
came out fine for me they continue to not do so for others.