[Techtalk] ? and "

Rebecca J. Walter rjp at mail.tele.dk
Sat Feb 23 19:54:15 EST 2002


On Sat, 2002-02-23 at 18:56, 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 the problem is that it isn't plain text.  Microsoft often uses
what it called "smart" quotes -- the ones that curve in to the thing
being quoted.  I think it is a special character that probably isn't
supported in a lot of the standard fonts.

Now this is just my guess, and probably not an educated one.  I also
often see ? for other special characters in web pages.  Like ones
written in foreign languages by people who can't figure out how to make
æ, å, and ø in proper html.





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