Administrivia: Weird Characters in Messages
By Jody Kravitz
From time to time over the past two months or so, I've noticed that my spelling checker would detect a word that seemed to be spelled correctly as printed on the screen, but the Unix spelling checker still didn't like it. The message above, from Karl Ellison, may have shed some light on the problem. Karl's message contained some punctuations which were not in the "standard" 7-bit ASCII character set. In particular, they had the "high order bit on". Its actually not to hard to get this to happen from the keyboard of a PC, and I wouldn't doubt that it can happen from the keyboard of a Mac as well. Unfortunately these special characters are not universally understood, and my Sun workstation does something really _WEIRD_ with them: it hides them completely! I think I've got the text above back to what it was intended to look like, and I think I've figured out a way to detect such weirdnesses in the future. I try very hard to put out a digest that will look right on _ANY_ system, so if you see something weird, please drop me a note at:
rollreq@foxtail.com
and point out the weirdness, quoting the exact text if possible, and describe how it looked on your screen.
Thanks for your help,
Jody
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(Message sent Mon 25 Dec 1995, 19:57:07 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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