--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote:
>
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Share Long <sharelong60@> wrote:
> >
> > meru, I don't know what this means. I often don't with your
> > posts. But love them anyway...
>
> No comment on Share's comment, but I do have one on
> the weird embedded characters, which I preserve above
> as opposed to cutting them out, as I usually do.
>
> Where TF do these things come from? They seem to
> originate with people who use email -- possibly of
> a certain type -- to respond to FFL posts. They aren't
> EOL (end of line) characters, because they appear as
> they do above in weirdass places, in the middle of
> sentences, not at the end of lines. They're probably
> not spurious Tab characters, because who would put a
> Tab in the middle of a sentence? So WTF are they, and
> where do they come from?
>
> They are clearly visible in the FFL Yahoo viewer, and
> in some email readers. So WTF are they (and they are
> NOT in any way limited to Share's posts, and have
> showed up in the posts of many other people), and
> how can we make them go away?
>
> Google identifies them as NBS characters, which means
> non-breaking spaces. But as I understand it, you have
> to actually press a key combination to insert an NBS.
> Just pressing the spacebar doesn't do it, unless your
> email client is brain damaged. So what's up with this,
> eh?
There are different specifications for encoding characters. Email systems seem
to attempt to translate between these systems, but often fail. Operating
Systems have different defaults, and web pages such as viewing FFL online may
have a character set specified or not, this Post Message page I am typeing in
has no character set specified. Any non-ASCII characters like curly quotes, em
and en dashes often tend to get screwed up. Some non HTML characters Windows
uses for these seem to be OK for FFL, but I have only tried a few. I have tried
standard HTML characters in the Rich-Text Editor, and it screws many of them up
or removes them. So it is a crap shoot. I often cut the reply window into a
text editor, and write there in ASCII and then past back into the Window.
Here are some Windows characters writing directly into the web FFL interface;
lets see how many display in whatever you are viewing this with:
left curly single quote: `
right curly single quote: '
left curly double quote: "
right curly double quote: "
one-fourth fraction: ¼
one-half fraction: ½
three-fourths fraction: ¾
a tilde: ã
a diaerises: ä
copyright symbol: ©
e accent grave: è
e accent acute: é
en dash:
em dash:
pilcrow sign (paragraph ending symbol): ¶
pound sign: £
As I look in the preview, this looked fine. Once when I used the rich text
version of the FFL reply, I typed in Greek characters, and it previewed fine,
but the display on the actual forum was completely fucked. There are so many
platforms and software people are writing and receiving data from the forum in,
I wonder why it is not even worse.
