[Techtalk] ? and "

[Leslie]

Wouldn't notepad work? :) Notepad is my friend.

- Leslie

-----Original Message-----
From: techtalk-admin at linuxchix.org [mailto:techtalk-admin at linuxchix.org]
On Behalf Of hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2002 12:12 PM
To: techtalk at linuxchix.org
Subject: Re: [Techtalk] ? and "

On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 09:56:07AM -0800 or thereabouts, Carla Schroder
wrote:
> All right, what kind patient person out there can explain how " gets
changed 
> to ?
> 
> When I'm swapping plain text files between Windows land and Linux 
> world, my " get changed to ?
> 
> I see this on some web pages, too.
> 
> It's driving me nuts.  
> Is there a fix? Man, when you can't even depend on plain text.....  !

I think I know what this is. It's to do with something called "smart
quotes", which is something used in some MS programs. This turns
ASCII quote characters into some other characters which other MS
programs recognise, but the rest of the world doesn't.

I see this in web pages all the time. Lots of question marks and
missing hyphens. Sometimes the quotes are simply omitted, which 
can be most unfortunate. 

Someone has written a program called demoroniser which removes these,
luckily. I imagine there is a way to turn smart quotes off in Word
and whatever other applications use them so that your quotation
marks remain ASCII and are displayable (is that a word?) in non-MS
programs. I wish some news sites would figure this out :) 

Telsa
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