Re: Quote marks and Question marks

In article <1151497829.214312.131430@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Conrad" <cweiler1@xxxxxxx> wrote:

When I send e-mail file messages written in AppleWorks or Word -- they
leave looking great. However, any quotation marks show up at the
receiving end as question marks. If I include myself in the mailing --
the messages comes back to me with question marks instead of quotation
marks. I'm using an iBook G4 Mac with mac.com address.

Yes, that is correct.

To understand why, it is first necessary to understand a little bit
about what text is. As far as a computer is concerned, there is no such
thing as text (or sounds or picutres or anything else). Everything a
computer works with, without exception, is simply numbers. We decide
what those numbers mean--whether they describe values of color in a
picture, or characters of text in a word processing program.

A long time ago, a large group of people got together and agreed on one
particular, completely arbitrary, scheme for representing text in a
computer, which they named "ASCII." The number 32, they said, would draw
on a screen as a space. The number 110 would be a lowercase letter "n".
The number 55 would be a "7". The number 46 would be a period, the
number 85 would be an uppercase letter U, and so on.

Now, when i say a long time ago, I mean a LONG time ago. As in, before
the world had settled on the notion that there are eight bits in a byte.
Many early computing devices used 7 bits, not 8 bits, to represent a
single character, so ASCII only uses 7 bits. That means that this scheme
can only have 127 characters in it.

127 characters is enough for all the upper and lowercase letters in the
English alphabet, numbers, standard punctuation, and a handful of
special control codes that early computing devices and printers needed
to tell them when to stop and start. It is not enough for accented or
foreign-language characters and it is not enough for special punctuation
like typographer's (curly) quotes.

The email system, even today, can send only 7-bit ASCII text. Nothing
else. A standard email server uses 7-bit ASCII, period. This is even
true of file attachments in email; When you attach a file like a JPEG or
a PDF to an email, it gets specially "encoded" into a system that
represents it using 7-bit ASCII.

If you type an email message that contains characters which are not part
of standard ASCII, such as curly quotes or accented characters, those
characters are lost, because email works only with ASCII.

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