[thelist] Special chars on web pages

[aardvark]

> From: "rudy" <r937 at interlog.com>
>
> > ideally, running a search-n-replace to swap those characters
> > with their ISO character entities would do the job...
>
> you got entities on the brain, pal   ;o)

yeah, and flea and tick killer won't purge 'em, either...

> the characters hershel refers to are the single and double curly
> quotes (nyuk, nyuk) and the emdash

i know...

> the ascii encodings 34("), 39(') and 45(-), available through most
> (duh) keyboards, would seem to be the way to go
>
> but because it's ms-i'm-smarter-than-you-word, these are coming across
> encoded as 145, 146, 147, 148, and 151
>
> (149 and 150, by the way, are the infamous bullet and endash)

thing is, Word's gonna do it regardless... now, you could ask *every*
user of Word to disable that feature, or you could run the s-n-r
(either when you convert them to HTML, or using SSI)...

that way, the duty falls to the web admin folks, not the end user,
who won't know an s-n-r from a m-n-m...

> let's not quibble about whether those are the right names or not(*),
> because the point is, we need a way to get ms word not to use those
> encodings

huh?  i wasn't going down that road...

> > i recall somebody here saying that the culprit may be that the
> > author was using the unicode versions of the fonts on his/her
> > system, and if the user doesn't have the unicode versions,
> > then no dice...
>
> the author, if i understand hershel, is a word user, and is probably
> not going to do something like that on purpose or even knowingly

*exactly*

> by the way, i must not have unicode installed here either, because i
> keep getting an alert asking me if i want to download "Uniscribe"
> whenever i visit http://evolt.org/article/entities/17/21234/index.html
> (i always decline)

which is really odd, since there are no extended characters in the
HTML, only entities... it is possible there's an extended character
in the comments...

> but i do see hershel's curly quotes -- but maybe that's because
> i'm using internet explorer
>
> oh, the evil empire is insidious
[...]

i think it's because you're on windows... try it in another browser --
 i see it in O6 and N6...

anyway, my point was you're not going to get users to reconfigure MS
Word, most likely... so instead, use an s-n-r to swap the characters
with their ISO entities...

still trying to dig up that post about Unicode...

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