On Mon, Oct 18, 1999 at 01:30:21PM -0700, Khat Khan Dhu wrote:
I don't know if it's that I'm using a non-CGI
terminal, the Mailcity account I'm using, or
the character set you people use. But, about
It's the latter of the three.
This problem, sometimes known as the 'Dread Questionmark Disease',
because on some terminals, the characters show up as question marks,
is actually a character set mismatch.
As usual, it's Microsoft's fault.
To be more specific, the problem lies with an oxymoronically-named
feature called 'SmartQuotes', present in the Microsoft Office suite of
programs. When SmartQuotes is enabled, a non-standard code is used to
represent the directional quotes, the apostrophe, and the dash (as
opposed to the hyphen).
So far, that's not a big problem, right? If you save to plain text,
these characters should be replaced with standard ASCII characters,
right?
Wrong.
The non-standard characters are _not_ converted.
Consequently, if someone who isn't using Windoze tries to view the
document, unpredictable results will occur. The Windoze-using
poster won't even recognize there's a problem, because Windoze has
the non-standard character set installed, and so the characters will
display as intended.
The only cure for this, aside from dumping all your trashy Microsoft
applications, is to make sure that you disable the SmartQuotes feature.
Merely saving as plain text is not sufficient! You must disable the
SmartQuotes feature.
BTW, your problem isn't that you don't have a CGI-enabled terminal.
Such a beast doesn't exist, and wouldn't make much sense even if it
did.
a third of the fics that I recieve have the
Quotes ( " ) replaced with 2's and 3's, and
the apostrophes replaced with 9's.
So if you recieve a note from silly ol' me
asking you to resend your fic using the standard
ANSI character set, please, do not take it
I think you mean standard ASCII.
personaly. I just want to read your fics.
Indeed. When I see a fic littered with stray question marks,
my first impulse is to hit the 'd' key...