Formatting (Was: Why Rowling should not have outed DD)

[Steve]

---  "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Tonks wrote:
> <snip>
> > ... I am talking about people’s thoughts and  beliefs.  
> >... the politicians say “win the hearts and minds”
> > of people, ... You don’t do it with a “I am right and
> > if you don’t agree with me your wrong” attitude. ...
> 
> Carol responds:
> I agree with your point completely, but I'm quoting it for
> a different reason. The post is hard to read because Yahoo 
> has mangled it.
> 
> The only way I know to prevent Yahoo from treating 
> apostrophes and asterisks as if they were some sort of 
> indecipherable code is to post from the list. I vaguely 
> remember, though, a suggestion posted to this list for 
> avoiding this kind of garbling in messages ...

bboyminn:

First you can correct Tonks original Post by switching the
View of your browser's Character Encoding to Unicode(UTF-8).
 
Using SeaMonkey/Mozilla, from the menu, select 

[View] [Character Encoding] [Unicode(UTF-8)]

So, usually these characters creep in for one of a couple
of reasons. 

First, if you are using MS-Outlook for your email program,
it is probably set to use MS-Word to compose messages,
further MS-Word is probably set to match single and double
quote marks into pair. Your keyboard only has right hand
single and double quote ( ' " ), MS-Word has a formating
option to automatically switch match pairs of quote from
generic marks to matching left leaning and right leaning
marks. These left and right quote marks are from a 
different part of the character set than the standard
generic marks. Consequently, they do not display properly.

You can avoid this by setting the Options in MS-Word to
not automatically format quotes into matching pairs.

The other reason, is that the email/post is originating
on a non-English computer. That is a computer, browser,
or email program that does not use Western(ISO-8859-1)
as standard Character Encoding. In the case of Tonks
message quoted in part above, I fixed it by switching
to Unicode(UTF-8), and once switched, we see the message
does have left and right leaning double quote marks. 

Unicode is sort of a universal font. Though there are
various Unicode fonts, they all have the English
alphabet combined with characters from foreign language.
For example, there is a Unicode font that has English
plus Chinese characters. Also, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese,
Korean, etc....

When ever you come across a message with characters you
can't read try switching the Character Encoding. I've
indicated above how to do it in Mozilla browsers. In
MS-Internet Explorer, simply select from the menu -

[View] [Encoding] and select from the displayed list.

Just passing it along.

Steve/bboyminn