Wierd characters appearing

[pwhale]

HI:
I've had this problem for awhile - I think since OS 8.6 or 9.0.
E-mails and Word docs as attachments coming from PC are translating some characters incorrectly.
Mainly double quotes and dashes: an 'opening' double quote shows up as a 'closing' double quote, but it's sitting on the baseline (like a double comma) A 'closing' double quote becomes a percent sign. Any dashes (longer than hyphens) show up as a lower case 'o' with a gravŽ accent above it.
There are others, but these are the worst. Wouldn't 'curly' or typesetters quotes share the same ASCII character number in both Windows and Mac?
I have been stripping and replacing in BBEdit, but it wastes a lot of time.
I've been translating files between Win and Mac for years but this never used to happen.
I've checked settings for US English, etc
WHAT GIVES?

 

[Ecaboodle]

It will all depend on the fonts that have been used on the PC or the MAC. If you use Times or Helvetica on the MAC and the PC they should be the same. If you can't fix it in 20 call someone who can.

 

[GeorgeMack]

The problem is that Macs and PCs use different "encoding vectors" to store characters aside from the basic A-Z and 1-10 (all those fancy punctuation and accented characters, for example). Some programs recognize the format things were written in and convert to the Mac vector and some don't.
Word will open and convert a PC word document, if you ask it to, but may open it as straight text with a lot of garbage characters and unconverted "high-ASCII" characters otherwise. (In this case it says "Oh, character 225. I know what that is"—and is wrong.) Some e-mail programs (such as Eudora) and servers deal with these vectors graciously, and others just make assumptions. (Some of the Apple lists always mangle these characters!)
You can get AppleScripts to do the remapping if it bothers you enough, or there may be a preference on one of your menus that will help. It depends on how serious it is for you.