Damn, typical Microsoft, screwing up something as
simple as writing a fanfic lol.  

All right, I'm going to do some research on how to
turn those damn things off...  

--- The Wanderer <inverseparadox@comcast.net> wrote:

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.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not
mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to
control them.

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