From: Alline, Vince (MC1968)
Date: December 21, 2008 6:37:58 PM EST
To: Distribute_Jasper_Jottings-owner
Subject: Re: JASPER JOTTINGS Week 51 – 2008 Dec 21
Hi John,
I have a simple question which I’m sure has a long and complicated answer, but I’ll ask it anyway. Why do I sometimes run into the following when I read your email (but not on the website)?
I’m looking for an apostrophe (‘) and I find ’
I’m looking for an open quotes (“) and I find “
I’m looking for a close quotes (“) and I find â€
I’m looking for a dash (-) and I find —
I’m looking for a bullet point (·) and I find •
Needless to say, this doesn’t make for very smooth reading, but of course you have a logical explanation. Maybe we’ve just discovered why that coveted Pulitzer Prize has so far eluded you.
Anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and thank you on an ongoing basis for a thankless job well done!
Vince Alline
[JR: Pulitzer? More like copyright infringement!]
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From: “reinke, fjohn68″
Date: December 21, 2008 6:48:38 PM EST
To: Alline, Vince (MC1968)
Subject: Re: JASPER JOTTINGS Week 51 – 2008 Dec 21
VA: Sounds like a font problem. Certain fonts don’t support every character. A font can become corrupted. Your email reading program translates the message into fonts defined in the program’s preferences. If that font is corrupt or doesn’t recognize that character, it displays the code string. Can’t think of an easy way to fix it. What email client are you using? If it’s only you, then it’s you. I might be possible for Yahoo to screw it up. BUT, that’s unlikely since I get copies emailed to me as a check. fjohn68
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From: Alline, Vince (MC1968)
Date: December 21, 2008 8:41:30 PM EST
To: “reinke, fjohn68″
Subject: Re: JASPER JOTTINGS Week 51 – 2008 Dec 21
FWIW, I have my email forwarded from my MC account to my Gmail account, then on to my ISP webmail and it’s finally downloaded to Thunderbird (Believe it or not, I actually have a reason for this). Tbird is set to receive mail in the original HTML. After receiving your reply, I changed it to simple HTML and then to plain text. Although the fonts were different, it had no effect on the problem. I then downloaded it in Outlook Express – no change. I went back and checked my Gmail webmail account. It read exactly the same.
Now thoroughly confused, I went into the Tbird options and checked the box to Apply the default character encoding to all incoming messages. This had the effect of replacing the aforementioned gibberish with fresh new gibberish. Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just to confuse matters further, I checked last week’s Jottings and it came through perfectly. Aren’t computers wonderful?
Vince
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From: Alline, Vince (MC1968)
Date: December 21, 2008 10:10:00 PM EST
To: fjohn68
Subject: Update: JASPER JOTTINGS Week 51 – 2008 Dec 21
As a true engineer, I don’t know when to stop tinkering. I went into Tbird’s options and changed the default character encoding from Western(ISO-8859-1) – the default setting – to Unicode(UTF-8). Now the symbol for a dash looks like �” but all the other characters appear normal.
My research indicates that this all may have to do with the use of items such as “smart apostrophes” and “smart quotes”. Of course, since Microsoft is involved, the term is an oxymoron. Apparently MS Word uses different symbols for these punctuation marks consisting of periods with curly tails rather than the more common slanted slash marks. Consequently they are encoded differently and are misunderstood by many applications, thus producing the bizarre markings. Oh well, at least the majority of my problem has been solved.
Vince
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[JR: Once I saw what side of the boundary the problem resided, I sighed with releif. Have fun trying to figure this one out. I do know that corrupt font files on Windoze can also screw you up. Argh! Onto Linux asap.]
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