Weird characters (not Chinookophiles)

[Mike Cleven]

Dave Robertson wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Anybody have the technical know-how to help me stop weird characters from appearing in messages I send to the list?
>
> Seems to happen most often when I import text from Word documents.
>
> It makes quotation marks and other punctuation show up as crazy-looking strings of digits, boxes, and dingbats.  Very disruptive to the eye.

It has to do with the default character set you're using in your mail
program - which is what?  If you don't have American or British standard
English layouts selected, then there'll be some unicode alterations for
certain characters, which is the problem you're experiencing.  I get
emails from my friends in Istanbul where an accented y stands in for an
'i' etc because of the different Romance-character keyboard layouts.
Have a look through your mail program prefs, your OS prefs and your
browser prefs....

MC