[pianotech] OT: Mac

[Jim Moy]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 8:47 AM, David M. Porritt <dmporritt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why is it that so often with documents created on a Mac that the simple
> apostrophe [ ‘ ] often shows up as [ � ]?

It's a character set problem, which is the correspondence of the
symbols you type on your keyboard to the numerical bytes of value that
are greater than 127 (there are fewer problems with values under 128).

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page

It depends on what program you are using when you say "documents
created on a Mac," and also where you are viewing it and what program
you are using (or where you're printing it) when you say "shows up
as." For example, I am typing this email into Gmail inside Firefox,
and a simple apostrophe around 'this' word will show up just fine
anywhere else, because its value is 39, and Gmail understands this.

But if you're typing in a word processor with "smart quotes" or some
such feature turned on, you might get a different value, perhaps 218
and 219, because the opposite-facing quotes are different symbols. And
those values (being greater than 127) are less well agreed upon
historically, and cause problems.

For the most part (the past ten years or so), this issue has been
resolved by Unicode, and most programs use an encoding called UTF-8
when there's a chance of it needing to be portable on multiple
computers, operating systems, etc. But old software will always be a
problem.

Jim