Re: [Pan-users] Annoying ’ in posts

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 01:33:29AM +0000, DLSauers wrote:
> Annoying characters in posts:
> 
>  ’ 
> 
> Is there some font setting or something that can remove these annoying 
> glyhps or what ever they are... 


Short answer: it's an encoding problem. Some doofus is probably pasting 
so-called "Smart Quotes" from Microsoft Word into their post, and their 
news reader program (or Google Groups *spit*) is not adjusting the 
encoding as it should.

Read this article for more details:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

The article is aimed at programmers, but doesn't assume any programming 
knowledge, and everyone should read it.


> I've tried setting all kinds of fonts etc.. and they still appear... I 
> just want plain text and the correct ' and " that should be there.

It's nothing to do with the font, and there's no such thing as "plain 
text".

You *might* be able to fix the problem by using the menu command:

View > Body Pane > Set character encoding... 

but you need to know what the encoding *actually* is, as opposed to what 
the post claims it to be. Or be lucky in your guess :)



-- 
Steven