Recently, every time I go to read a trip report, I've noticed that some of the punctuation, usually ', ", or ,, has been replaced with ?. Any idea of why this is happening? It makes it very difficult to read the reports, so I've started copying and pasting the text into word. Then I just use the Find/replace feature and make all ? into ,. Is my computer not recognizing some aspect of the font used for posting the trip reports?

Any suggestions would be helpful. Again, this has only recently started happening with the trip reports and I have not made any major changes to my computer system.

Thanks for your help.

What operating system and Web browser are you using?

What is probably is is high bit characters that your browser isn't handling properly. Can you point me to one that you think had a lot of it? I'll take a look and figure out how to avoid them in the future.

For the most part the reports are submitted in word format which uses characters that don't always show up well on browsers. I try to catch and replace them, but don't do a full copy-edit after dumping the text into the HTML template.

This one (http://www.mouseplanet.com/dtp/trip.rpt/report_files/dlparis.rpt/linders04ap.htm) I noticed it pretty heavily. Even just the first few paragraphs have quite a few examples.

(I'm using XP and IE 6.0)

I see them too. Looks like maybe the "smart quotes" didn't translate. It's mostly quotation marks and apostrophes that are missing.

Maybe it was typed up someplace else, then transferred to this site, and things didn?t translate so well. I?ve seen that in lots of web sites.
Maybe the mystery can be solved if someone asks the authors what software was originally used.

My operating system is Windows 2000, soon to be updated to XP, and Internet Explorer 6.0. One of the trip reports that was full of ???? was the one recently posted Sam Price. Here's a few examples of what I see:

(1) Sweat dripping down your back, ?come on guys if we ride ?Small World? again we can grab a few precious minutes of cool breathable air?.

(2) After all, I?m and engineer, and I have imagination. I know that I?d be a great Imagineer. I?ll just submit my resume along with the other 75,000/yr hopefuls.

Looks like it is mostly " and ' that are replaced as Stan4d_steph mentioned. It's not a big deal, it was just that it just recently started happening. I had had no problems in the past.

Thanks for your help.

If your browser supports it (and IE 6 does), you can change the page encoding to Western European or ISO-8859-1 (or ISO-8859-15) and it should display properly. In Internet Explorer, select View->Encoding->Western European (Windows).

Thanks, Mox -- that worked for me, but I can't seem to get it to "stay" on that encoding. Something I'll have to deal with next week, though. It's almost 11pm and I have a 6 am flight.