Re: NY Times - Behind the Emperor's Club Escort Service

On Mon, 7 Apr 2008 18:36:32 -0400, Bo Raxo wrote
(in article <uOOdnYoVT97xP2fanZ2dnUVZ_vyinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>):


"Amy Guskin" <aisling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0001HW.C41FD0E800EC7D69F0182648@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
Other than the lack of paragraphs, mine shows up with punctuation intact.
Although I have, on occasion, seen something similar to what Amy
describes,
I don't recall if it was from you or not. This one showed up fine on my
reader though. <<

I should have mentioned -- I'm using a real newsreader, Hogwasher. Tiny
Dancer, are you using a newsreader, or Google Groups? I'm wondering if
that
makes a difference. Clearly, if a plain-text-based newsreader (like
Hogwasher) is doing this, I think anyone using a plain text newsreader
will
be having this problem.


I'm using Outlook Express. Peter's posts have no paragraph breaks, but the
other problems don't show up.

However, in your reply to Peter's post, the apostrophe in the subject line
turned in to three weird symbols (something I can't identify, and a Euro
symbol, and a trademark symbol). I just chalked it up to you being a
complcated person... <<

Hee.

It's odd; I have no explanation for it. It's only Peter's posts. And, this
is an ordinary plain text newsreader, one I use a LOT (I'm a moderator
elsewhere), and I don't have that problem with anyone else.

In this case, it was mostly apostrophes in this particular post -- they
are
all rendering out as a lower case "a" with a circumflex over it, followed
by
a bullet, followed by a degree symbol. It's one thing for diacritical
marks
to get screwed up when converting to plain text -- I see the word "fiance"
without the e-with-an-accent at the end of it;

That's an accent aigu (pronounced ak-sawnt ay-goo) - three years of French
in high school, and I actually remember some of it <<

French speaker here, too. (And Gaelic. Plus a smattering of German and
Italian -- I studied opera in college, which accounts for all of the
languages save Gaelic.) Anyway, I figure most people wouldn't know an "aigu"
(or in English, "acute") accent from a grave accent from a hole in the wall,
so I usually translate it into 'civilian' when I have to refer to it.

instead, I get a capital "A"
with a tilde over it followed by a copyright symbol -- but the apostrophes
shouldn't be screwed up unless they're coming in as curly apostrophes,
like
from a word processing application.

I think there are different character sets - like Unicode and...um, some
others. I don't know much about this, but every now and then my newsreader
warns me that something I've pasted is in a character set that others may
not have, and do I want to convert it to...uh, something, maybe plain text.
I don't know much about this, except I click yes and nobody complains about
the formatting.

The content, they complain endlessly. But not the formatting... <<

Well, as a web designer, the character set problem I run into most often is
when people send me text from their word processor. Then I get curly quotes,
curly apostrophes, and odd word processor-created spaces. These make all
kinds of nasty unreadable characters on your website if you don't make some
changes when you paste that text into your HTML document. Oh, diacritical
marks, too. And since many of my clients are in the serious music biz, I'm
constantly making global changes to every accent imaginable, turning them
into their proper unicode or HTML cognates. Which is why I wondered if Peter
was somehow copying and pasting the text of these articles as something other
than plain text. I probably wouldn't have said anything if it were another
poster, but I usually really enjoy reading the items Peter posts. OTOH, with
certain other posters, I'd consider myself fortunate to have their posts hard
to decipher... ;-)

Amy
--
"In my line of work you gotta keep repeating things over and over and over
again for the truth to sink in, to kinda catapult the propaganda." - George
W. Bush, May 24, 2005

.

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