Please, please remove those ugly rectangles

[vovan]

I like most of the stories, and have already voted for this week's best story. But here is what I wanted to say. Don't you think that things like ‘, “, ”, and ’ are somewhat annoying? It's not a major defect of most of the stories, but it is soooo easy to avoid, that I couldn't keep quiet any more, since the amount of stories with these symbols has increased lately. Believe it or not, I know the reason.
If you use an 'advanced' text editor, like MS Word, of Write, or something like that, it uses an extended character set. Ever noticed, how opening quotation mark and closing quotation mark differ in MS Word? Well, this bulletin board does not use this 'extended' character set, but uses a normal, standard character set. So, it does not understand some of the symbols used by advanced text editors. (Actually, it is a limitation of forms used to receive posts, but that could be too long to explain.) Any how, if you want to get rid of those ugly squares and rectangles in your post (please do if you have them) follow these steps:

• Type your story in your editor - compose it, type it, format it, spell check it, whatever you need your 'advanced' editor for.
• Save it in '.txt' - text only format. This format uses the set of characters that the forum software will understand.
• Now you can safely copy your great story to the clipboard and paste it right into your 'new thread' form.

Thank you that you took your time to read this. Thank you in advance if you will try to avoid 'special characters'.

[General Ludd]

I'm looking at comas and quotation marks, not "squares and rectangles".

[Gaius Marius]

Yeah, I think it's the character set in your browser config, not the board. The ascii codes come across fine, but you're not interpreting them right for some reason. Looks like its yer fault - I see everything fine.

Look to thine own house, before ye cast stones.

[Excelsior]

vovansim:

I think your problem is that you've got your browser encoding set to unicode. Go to the "View" menu and go to "Encoding" and select "Western European (Windows)." This should fix it.

[civ-n00b]

i thought he was referring to those ugly rectangles in the screen shots (like in the 432-hour succession game)... silly me

[EricWright]

Excelsior said:

Go to the "View" menu and go to "Encoding" and select "Western European (Windows)."

That won't work well on non-Windows platforms... well, Unix/Linux platforms anyway... I have noticed some of the same behaviour from home, where I have a linux box, but from work (WinNT), I see characters just fine.

Remember, not EVERYONE bows to the M$ throne.

Eric

[Excelsior]

Originally posted by EricWright
That won't work well on non-Windows platforms... well, Unix/Linux platforms anyway... I have noticed some of the same behaviour from home, where I have a linux box, but from work (WinNT), I see characters just fine.

Remember, not EVERYONE bows to the M$ throne.
Eric

True, but most people do... Anyway, Western European (ISO) should work too.

[NZrevenge]

Hey! I only bow to it because it came with my computer!

By the way, Windows XP, while it looks cool, and is great for multiple users, still has too many bugs (especially when trying to use the backwards compatibility options for older games).

I am but a M$ guinea pig... Oh well, those fade effects will keep me entertained for hours on end... Along with the error report loop (basically if a program stops responding, you can't shut it down because Windows keeps interupting the shutdown with the same error report, over and over and over again... I wonder if M$ will get annoyed by 50+ emails from me within 5 mins about the display panel freezing )