Author: Daniel Pope Date: To: hampshire Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Has anyone ever got pasta on their computer? And
afew other things
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 11:54:15AM +0100, Becky Taylor wrote: > > What are those? Smart quotes? Em dash? I'm receiving your e-mail
> marked up as
> > ASCII, which can't encode those characters. There must be a character set
> > problem somewhere along the way.
>
> the one in the middle is a hyphen, and the ones at the sides are
> apostrophes (I tend to use them as single quotes)
Unfortunately not. They are encoded as literal question marks. They were
probably encoded as smart single quotes and and em dash in your original
signature and saved in the Windows-1252 character set.
I suspect either Thunderbird or mailman (the mailing list software) is
converting your special characters to literal '?'s. Possibly one of them
is interpreting your signature as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8. In either of those
character sets, those particular Windows-1252 bytes don't mean anything,
so it outputs a ? instead.
To fix it, you can either try to ensure that Thunderbird and whatever
you use to edit your signature are talking the same character set, or
you can replace your smart quotes with straight apostrophes (') and your
dash with a hypen (-). That latter workaround works, by the way, because
those characters are the same in all of the above characters sets. If you
wanted to put £-sign in your signature, for example, you might have to
ensure your characters sets are all in alignment, something I don't
quite know how to do on Windows[1].
Dan
[1] And judging by the amount of e-mail I get from Outlook users
ostensibly in ISO-8859-2, I suspect not a lot of people do.
