[Archers] question marks

[Jerry Alexandratos]

On 9/7/2012 9:24 AM, Holly Gibbons wrote:
> Apologies to all. I cannot for the life of me figure out why apostrophes
> and space bars always show up as question marks in my postings. It is
> totally annoying. Sorry. Nuala

Hi Nuala,
     I see your same problem when people send me e-mail from outside of 
the country.  It is most likely the character encoding that your e-mail 
is set to use.  Mine uses "Western (ISO-8859-1)", which means it is set 
to one of the standards for American English.  This is different from 
the font (e.g. Arial) which simply changes the shapes of the letters. 
Not all computers use the same character encoding, so when they hit a 
character they do not have saved, they display the characters they do 
not recognize as blocks or question marks. (This change probably happens 
on the computer hosting sca.org.) You could fix it by changing the 
outgoing e-mail character encoding in your e-mail program, but this is 
pretty deeply buried in the options for most e-mail programs.  I use 
Thunderbird, so I can only help you with that program.  I hope this is 
slightly clearer than mud for you.  People who know computers better 
than I are welcome to correct me.  regards,
Jerry
-- 
Jerry Alexandratos, Technical Laboratory Manager, alexanje at mail.nih.gov
Macromolecular Crystallography Laboratory, tel#301-846-5335
Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research