[Trombone-l] Books related to performance

[Simon Bailey]

hi,

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 09:32:44AM +0000, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> >Daniel, I'm curious.  Every time you use an apostrophe my mail reader
> >converts it into a square box.  Are you using some obscure font?  I find it
> >quite irritating, but then that condition could be age related.
> 
> 
> I?ve always thought that those typographical oddities were from moving text 
> between Apple and Windows environments.
> 
> But I also use a lot of ?comic sans MS?, because it looks a lot like 
> hand-drafted lettering.  I guess that puts me squarely in old school.  But 
> it still doesn?t explain how ASCII gets changed, between systems.

it is a problem with converting from mac to ascii. the macs follow typographical
conventions and replace apostrophes with some weird character from their
internal codepage. when the text is then converted to 7-bit ASCII for email
purposes, this character is naturally not part of the 127 character ascii set,
so is replaced by a box, a question mark, a squiggly character, etc. depending
on which email system is viewing the email. if your email system has a font
which includes the funny character the macs use to replace apostrophes, then you
will see the apostrophe, the box/question mark/squiggly thing is just a symbol
that the font you are using doesn't contain the character.

rambling on as always,
the font and text-encoding geek (was part of my job for a long while...)

-- 
Simon Bailey
Systems Administrator
Institut fuer Informatik                                  
Universitaet Innsbruck
Technikerstrasse 21a/2 
A-6020 Innsbruck
Tel: +43 (0) 512 507 - 6433                          
Mob: +43 (0) 664 812 5267
Fax: +43 (0) 512 507 - 2887
http://informatik.uibk.ac.at/