Since I posted this to our "kissing cousin" list on the RW forum, and not all are subscribed there, I thought I'd prop it here too -- for anyone here who may wonder about such things.
Peggy Neill wrote:
What is the l/4 that I am seeing?
This errata finds its basis in the wide array of character sets, font sets or text encodings used on the Internet and word processing programs, plus the type of server found on either end of the transmission. Beyond those factors, you cannot rely on your own browser to have all of the non-standard characters needed as part of its default font set (or indeed, ANY font set). So in a nutshell, it basically boils down to varying standards and interpretative incompatibilities (the left hand not syncing with the right).
Quotation marks, apostrophes and foreign accents are typical characters that may render incorrectly. When email first began (circa 1982), it wasn't designed to handle most non-English characters. Even today, some of the special characters, like Greek letters and mathematical symbols and accent marks of non-English languages, don't always come through correctly in email. Fortunately most modern email programs will now correctly display �, �, �, �, and other German or foreign characters.
Message text composed in plain ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) translates the most widely between various computer systems and mail programs, since it was the original standard developed. But ASCII is limited to 128 characters, and some of those are non-printing control characters like tabs. Obviously not everyone speaks English, so more characters were needed beyond what the basic ASCII set is limited to. Therefore additional sets of characters and text-encoding standards were developed, but these vary by language or even one's choice of computer platform (Windows versus Linux versus Macintosh operating systems).
Text that has been cut and pasted from word-processing programs into e-mail messages can sometimes contain characters outside of the basic ASCII set, and those characters are the ones that typically show up as jumbled marks (? � - � � � etc.) when the mail program or system doesn't know how to display them. Same goes with erratic (typically condensed) formatting, or unwrapped (runaway) text. Saving a document as plain text before cutting and pasting can help resolve these kinds of problems (in programs like MS Word, you can also choose a non-default encoding preference when doing so to match your taste).
Also most browsers and email programs allow you to change the default font or character setting to "ISO Latin 1" or "Western Latin 1" for viewing German and other foreign text correctly, or to select that option for the particular document you are viewing.
Due to the wide variances already mentioned, and for security reasons (to prevent the spreading of viruses, worms and Trojans), most mailing lists explicitly forbid the use of HTML formatted e-mail (typically seen on web pages) or the inclusion of binary attachments (MIME or other encoding). If they didn't, you could add one more layer of confusion and a touch of Russian roulette to the mix.
Lots of folks on mail lists wonder about these issues, so I hope this explains it sufficiently.
Jb
