messed-up postings

[sagehen]

>I don't know why my posts to ADS-l arrive with strange characters and
>symbols in them.  That doesn't happen when I post them to other
>lists, and in my experience the ADS list postings often display with
>various corruptions or interruptions in them.  So I assume that the
>ADS server translates line breaks, hyphens, or other symbols that it
>can't read into their code equivalent.  Perhaps the list moderators
>can check into this?  I use apple's Mail program on a Mac powerbk,
>and sometimes I paste in text created in MS word for mac.  I know how
>annoying it can be to get posts with these sorts of interruptions in
>the text, and if anyone can advise me how to avoid that happening,
>I'll take whatever steps I need to "clean up" the posts (so long as I
>don't have to switch to a windows computer, which I don't have).
>
>Dennis
>
 ~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm no expert in these matters, but it is clear that one very common source
of these annoying interruptions in otherwise readable text is that
smart/curly quotes & apostrophes are being transmitted.  Since ASCII
doesn't support these, they get transcribed on the receiving computer into
whatever bits of  code it uses for the particular (ASCII) signal received .
One way of dealing  with this problem whether you are receiving or sending
such text is to move the whole message into a word program and use its
"find & replace" command, and substitute straight quotes & apostrophes for
all the occurences.
Lots of the text that Barry, for instance,  picks up from archives or
wikipedia & pastes in or imports, come out  on my old Mac with elaborate 2-
or 3-character clumps for each of these marks.  It makes for very tiresome
reading.  The stuff directly off his keyboard comes through just fine.
When the sending & receiving machines ( and programs) are the same or
closely related, there may be no distortion.
AM

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