When I read the story "A Swimming Penectomy" By: jearns85, I noticed several strange characters. They look like four little squares in a square array. The top row of squares have tiny upper case "F" characters in them. The lower row has an "F" and a "D" in them.

I have copied and pasted one of them into this message and it looks the same to me.

Here is the character: �

Is this a problem with the way I have Firefox 3.0.5 configured? What does the character look like to you?

The url for the story is:

http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/S/ea_210214a_swimmi.htm

Set your character encoding under the VIEW option to "Western Windows 1252" and this will go away. It's probably a comma, apostrophe, or the quote marks being replaced by this character. Mine does the same thing.

Paolo wrote: Tue Jan 20, 2009 12:18 am Set your character encoding under the VIEW option to "Western Windows 1252" and this will go away. It's probably a comma, apostrophe, or the quote marks being replaced by this character. Mine does the same thing.

I went to Tools, Options, Content, Fonts & Colors, Advanced, Character Encoding and changed the default encoding to Western (Windows 1252).

I then closed and reopened Firefox. I still see the same thing. It is both the apostrophe and double quotes that are being replaced. The comma is not affected.

It's just that archive's software do not send a <meta charset=....> tag in the files.

Your browser takes the default encoding, for which it was configured, or tries to guess.

To temporarily set encoding on firefox go to:

View -> Encoding.

PS. To me this character looks like question mark in a square.

fhunter wrote: Tue Jan 20, 2009 3:42 am It's just that archive's software do not send a <meta charset=....> tag in the files.

Is that fixable? Adding it to a template or whatever?

Matthew

I read the story, enjoyed it very much. But I didn't see any strange characters anywhere. It did remind me of another story in the archives that dealt with swimmers having penectomies to 1. make them faster in the pool

and 2. help them keep their minds off the girls and using their "energies" on them.

gandalf

gandalf (imported) wrote: Tue Jan 20, 2009 8:23 am I read the story, enjoyed it very much. But I didn't see any strange characters anywhere. It did remind me of another story in the archives that dealt with swimmers having penectomies to 1. make them faster in the pool

and 2. help them keep their minds off the girls and using their "energies" on them.

gandalf

That was probably this story: "The Athaletes' Sacrifice"

http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/A/newea_25417The_Atha.htm

That encoding problem that creates the funny boxes is due to Microsoft's WORD insisting on curly and smart quotes. It happens with the Firefox browser and on Macintosh computers. IF you write for the web, you should turn off curly and smart quotes in WORD.

I had to edit 50 to 60 files on my website just to get rid of those things.

The Athaletes Sacrifice was the story I was thinking about.

Gandalf

Dave (imported) wrote: Tue Jan 20, 2009 9:53 am That encoding problem that creates the funny boxes is due to Microsoft's WORD insisting on curly and smart quotes. It happens with the Firefox browser and on Macintosh computers. IF you write for the web, you should turn off curly and smart quotes in WORD.

I had to edit 50 to 60 files on my website just to get rid of those things.

I write my stories with a text editor. Could someone who uses Word get rid of curly and smart quotes easily by exporting the file as ASCII, loading it into notepad and copying it from there?