[thelist] Special chars on web pages

[rudy]

> 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)

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

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)

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

   (*)Most HTML References Are Wrong
   I’ve lost count of all the books, articles, and websites
   that claim an em dash is “—”—but they’re all wrong.
   The entire range from  through Ÿ are invalid
   characters, and consequently should not be used.
           The Trouble With EM 'n EN
           http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/

> 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

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)

but i do see hershel's curly quotes -- but maybe that's because
i'm using internet explorer

oh, the evil empire is insidious

me and msword don't get along too well -- recall my frustrated plea
for help recently, trying to get it not to capitalize the first character

finding the msword option "don't use any characters in the decimal
range 129 through 159" will likely be as painful


rudy