[Gpdd] MISCELLANEOUS: Question Marks and other strange characters
Admin
gpdd-admin at gpdd.org
Wed Jan 19 11:04:31 EST 2011
The following are the results of a question we asked of a small group of
GPDD members. If you have any suggestions to add, we would welcome them
too. If it were possible, we would love to "fix" this "technical"
problem if we could.
QUESTION: Where or What or Why do some posts show Question Marks??? If
anyone has any other suggestions or ideas or maybe some real computer
expertise on this, we would love to hear from all of you.
We do have one member who is using a Reader to listen to the daily
digest posts. It has to be so annoying when the Reader is reading a
question when it is really is NOT a question!
A BIG Thank You to all Members who gave or have given or will give their
opinions. This is not a promise to fix anything. Just some ideas from
Members with ideas. If one person gets an idea from the following
thoughts to stop their marks from showing up in their digest post……….it
would have been worth the effort. Rather than clog up the Digest, we
will ask you to send your suggestions to:
Moderator.kc at gpdd.org
Subject: Question Marks.
We will publish all the suggestions once all the results are in. Here
are the first few ideas.
…………The question marks usually come up when there is some kind of
character misinterpretation. For example, if I use a letter with an
accent on it (like you get all the time in French), it might not show up
properly on someone else's computer. People whose posts are coming
through with question marks should check what font they are writing
their messages in, and people who are receiving posts with question
marks in them should check what font they are viewing messages in. Using
strange fonts is usually the culprit, though not always. If it's a font
problem, changing to something that is more universal (e.g., Times,
Verdana) will fix this. If that doesn't fix the problem, then it's a
different reason and I'm afraid I am also at a loss.
…………I have seen question marks in posts when I read them on my phone,
sometimes. I have seen question marks inserted, sometimes, when a post
was made from a phone.
…………..I have noticed in a post the text does not go to the end of the
page on the right side. So I wonder if the member might be using the
enter button instead of allowing the program to just use it's own
wordwrap function.? Maybe this is what is causing the ??? marks in her
post? There is a ? at the beginning or end of each paragraph. Sometimes
people are used to their typewriters and will just hit the enter button
sort of like when they used to hit the carriage return handle. The line
of ??? is a spacebar moving across a page? Just my thoughts. Hope this
helps.
……………..I was wondering about them, too. The only thought I have had as
I've seen these appear in some posts but not others is whether some
people are using some sort of character that does not translate across
platforms and/or countries? For instance, there was a while where
whenever I received emails from my sister I was getting these weird
J-like characters appearing here and there through out her email. Much
later, I realized (somehow, I've forgotten how) that she was using a
rich text or html type of fancy emoticon that was part of her email
program which my email program (at the time anyway) couldn't interpret
and so whenever it happened, a J-like character was substituted.
Although everyone on the list corresponds in English, there are
different keyboards and language programs (right term?) for people in
countries who's main language is other than English. I don't know if
even a space bar tap or double tap from such a program creates this
problem. I wonder if there any correlation between ESL communicators of
certain languages and/or email providers and the question mark issue?
…………If the ??? marks only happen in the full digest mode, maybe it is a
program the full digest is using and the singles don't use?
………….You want to know the answer to the question (why there are question
marks?)
Our browsers reproduces the results of keystrokes (letters and symbols)
based on an international standard called the Unicode Transformation
Format. Not only does it keep track of the letters and symbols, but the
fonts (Arial, Times, serif, sans-serif, etc.) used to create those
words. The current standard is UTF-8
The UTF encoding is supposed to make sure that whatever I type on my
computer (to send as e-mail, a blog post, a Digest post or a web
comment) looks exactly how I typed it when you see it. All well and
good, but not all programs and fonts are created 100% compatible - not
even Microsoft. When a browser (or program using UTF to decode
characters) encounters a character it doesn't recognize, it will
substitute a character - usually a question mark - "?" - in its place.
The "usual suspects" for Unicode glitches are quotation marks, a hard
return, dashes ("em" and "en" dashes").
Ok, that makes sense so far - but what about the instances where some
people see question marks and others see the character that was
intended? The explanation for that is that for whatever reason, not all
browsers are set to decode
UTF-8.
While that isn't the only reason question marks show up in odd places,
it's the most common :)
Thanks! We hope to hear from you soon!
The GPDD Team
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