[Wikipedia-l] Box characters and question marks

[Karen AKA Kajikit]

Pierre Abbat wrote:
> 
> On Sunday 01 September 2002 01:52, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> > The boxes/question marks are almost always a result of pasting in text from
> > Microsoft Word or some other program that uses "fancy" quotation marks etc.
> >  I always assume it to be the result of a copyright violation and
> > google-test it (which I'll go do now).  That would explain all three of
> > your questions below--where they come from, why the contributor doesn't see
> > them, and why they don't display.
> 
> That answers one question: how they write boxes. It doesn't answer how to
> explain to them how to get rid of the boxes, or how the boxes turned into
> question marks.
> 
> BTW, I tried googling for various terms on that page and didn't find it.

The simplest explanation for this would be that the person is writing
their article/s in word with 'smart quotes' etc turned on so it's
inserting the character coding that the browsers don't recognise. They
don't see them themselves because their computer is perfectly well
equipped to reproduce them. The other thing is that if your computer
does not have a particular font?character set installed, it might not
know how to display it so it'll use the question marks instead. When I
look at articles with Asian characters in them I just see a string of
question marks because my computer does not have the font to read them.
I'm assuming that the person creating these characters has the font
installed, so they see the intended result... 

The only way to get rid of them is not to use the font...

-- 

Karen AKA Kajikit

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