I have just noticed that when I read stories using my laptop computer, both single and double quotes are displayed as question marks. This does not happen when I use my desktop computer. I use Firefox 1.5.0.12 on both computers. The desktop computer has XP Home and the laptop has XP Pro.

Does anyone what could be causing this and what I can do about it?

I run Firefox 2.0.0.4 on both machines here, one is 2k, one is XP Pro. I don't have this problem?

I see it happen with various punctuation in the stories, especially when I print them out. I use XP Home on a pretty new desktop. Same thing happens on both the laptop, and the notebook in the truck when I download from the story archive...

Most, if not all, browsers turn to interpretation-tables whenever they encounter text that is not pure html. The tables tell them how to display signs that is not basic ascii or defined in html. That usually works, if the browser has any clue to what sort of text encoding system it is. (Which should be stated in the begining.)

When I looked on the source code of a few of the stories, I see that they are labeled as html-files. But it seems to me some of the content - quotation marks among that - is not html-standard. (The only variant that is part of basic html is ' and " - not the slanted, bent or other versions.)

That probably stems from copying-and-pasting, I would guess. Whatever quotation marks used in the source would be brought over.

So then there are a few signs that the browser doesn't exactly know what to do with. It will display them, as best it can - and it often works on the screen. But a printer might make something completely different of them.

I used a macintosh for a few days a short while back, when I had problems logging in, and it displayed some of the punctuation marks funny in the stories, I noticed. Usually that's a clue that they are non-standard (non-html) entities in the text, because mac and pc use different default tables.

sapient (imported) wrote: Sun Jun 24, 2007 2:25 am Most, if not all, browsers turn to interpretation-tables whenever they encounter text that is not pure html. The tables tell them how to display signs that is not basic ascii or defined in html. That usually works, if the browser has any clue to what sort of text encoding system it is. (Which should be stated in the begining.)

When I looked on the source code of a few of the stories, I see that they are labeled as html-files. But it seems to me some of the content - quotation marks among that - is not html-standard. (The only variant that is part of basic html is ' and " - not the slanted, bent or other versions.)

That probably stems from copying-and-pasting, I would guess. Whatever quotation marks used in the source would be brought over.

So then there are a few signs that the browser doesn't exactly know what to do with. It will display them, as best it can - and it often works on the screen. But a printer might make something completely different of them.

But that does not explain why a story (Harry Potter and the Knife of Klingsor, Part 1) will display correctly on my desktop machine and not on my laptop when both of them are using the same browser. I just checked and the story does display correctly with IE on my laptop. I hope that we can figure out how to make all computers with all modern browsers display and print the stories correctly.

CG, that probably won't happen, although its indeed a valid point.

I work at a large printshop, and this kind of problem is found all the time. Real publishers submit only PDF's these days, or proper applications (PageMaker, Quark, CS package files, etc, and not Word or .txt or html files). Of course, that never happens online, and what Sapient said stands true at this site.

That said...

As a writer:

The best way to submit stories online, I think, is simply type your story in a text file (Notepad) and save it as plain text. Copy and paste THAT data into the story submission on EA, and everyone will read it just fine. If you type in MSword or anything else like that, copy/paste it into a Notepad file, correct any wacky mis-interpretations with the "find/replace" command, and use that file to submit to the site.

As a reader:

If you find a story that is rendering badly on your computer, I can think of just one option; the same as mentioned above. Copy/paste the actual story into a Notepad file, and copy the bad character and replace it with the correct one using "find/replace". That won't work for spaces, however. At that point you're kinda screwed. Alternatively, when you are viewing the page with your browser, change the encoding (found under "view" in both Explorer and Firefox, I think).

Hope that helps a bit... You probably knew all this allready, but I'm slightly high, and feel a need to babble, evidently

StefanIsMe

Only two things I can think of are:

1. The "Character Encoding" setting. "Character Encoding" controls what un-recognized HTML characters are replaced with. This is probably your problem. Make sure this setting is the same on both machines.

2. The "Font" setting. If #1 doesn't fix it, make sure the Fonts are the same on both machines because some Fonts will show "normal" quotes correctly, but will show different characters for “open/close” quotes.

Unfortunately for you, I upgraded to FF 2004 about a month ago. So I don't know for sure where these settings are located in FF 1512... But here is how to get to them in FF 2004:

TOOLS --> OPTIONS --> CONTENT

Under "Fonts and Colors" click on the Advanced button.

For the technically un-initiated:

"FF 2004" is a common abreviation for Firefox 2.0.0.4

"FF 1512" is a common abreviation for Firefox 1.5.0.12

"TOOLS-->OPTIONS-->CONTENT" would mean to go into the TOOLS Menu (top row of FireFox Window) then click on OPTIONS, then click on CONTENT...

Thank you. After I read Stefan's message I looked at one of the stories with strange characters and that time it displayed correctly. I had not made any changes to Firefox. If I see another story with the problem, I will try your suggestions.

OK, I just hit this snag with an older story.

The quotes, ellipses, etc., are all black boxes with a "?" in them.

I use Firefox 2.0.0.4 and the fix is:

Go to VIEW

CHARACTER ENCODING

Make sure AUTO DETECT is turned off

Default should be Unicode UTF-8

Switch it to Western (ISO 8859-1)

The stories should then display correctly.

I THINK this has something to do with the old "Back in the day" formatter we used to use for posting stories.

Also, I'm running a dual core AMD machine with Windows 2k-sp4, which is essentially XP without all the stupidity added in. Must be, since I had to shove a couple of XP drivers down 2k's throat this time to get it to work.