Thanks to Patrick for his feedback. I'm sorry to note that my square and cube symbols (raised 2 and 3) did not appear correct on Patrick's computer (both appearing as question marks).
I think the question marks were not an incorrect translation of the square or the cube symbols. I think the question mark character was probably just his computer's way of showing as unknown any character that it did not recognize. I think it is interesting that in MY message (in red below), as sent back to me by Patrick, also did not show the characters correctly, but with a different error. In that case, it replaces the square and cube symbols with quote marks, one with opening quote marks and the other with closing quote marks. Indeed, I note that PATRICK'S message (in blue below) appeared to contain a question mark (or so he stated) where that character showed as a closing quote mark on my computer. This indicates that the problem of characters being misprinted in email messages is more common than expected. In this case, a perfectly ordinary character (Patrick's question mark) was transformed into something different when it was transmitted to me. So, it is not only special symbols like squares and cubes and micro symbols (mu), but even some common characters are subject to such errors. Regards, Bill Hooper =================================== On Jun 16 , at 8:53 AM, Patrick Moore wrote: > To me, the cubic and squared symbols looked the same as each other and were > the quotation mark “. > > I run Mac OS X.5.8 on a PowerPC G5. My e-mail is MS Entourage 12.2.4 for Mac. > > It might make a difference whether you and your recipients have HTML > formatting turned on. >> >> >> From: Bill Hooper <[email protected]> >> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> >> Subject: [USMA:47798] superscripts for SI symbols >> >> I recently had a helpful exchange with Pat Naughten about the difficulty of >> producing the SI symbols for square metre and cubic metre and others in >> email messages. >> >> He had a suggestion that works on my iMac but I have no way of knowing if >> the exponents I type (which appear correctly on MY computer) will show up >> correctly on other people's computers (particularly on non-Apple computers). >> >> For any of you who have a moment to reply, I'd be interested in knowing if >> the following example appears correct on your computer (with the exponents >> 2, and 3 appearing as smaller raised digits as is needed). >> >> Here is the example: >> "The cubic metre symbol is m“ and the square metre symbol is m”." >> >> Regards, >> Bill Hooper >> Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA
