[jbenny]

At the request of JSWolf, I am posting a new thread concerning the use of extended ASCII characters like curly quotes, em-dashes, apostrophes, etc.

I took "An Intimate Study of Sherlock Holmes", recently posted by RWood and tried to open it in FBReader. Like a lot of programs, FBReader didn't display the curly quotes and em-dashes correctly. Thinking that this was due to the use of the extended ASCII characters, instead of the equivalent HTML tags, I used Amber Palm Converter to get some HTML to experiment with. Although my experiment worked, it appeared that the Amber software makes substantial changes to the HTML that it creates.

Below, I have attached a Zip file that contains an HTML file that hopefully is closer to the original. I used a program called MakeDoc to extract this file from the posted PRC. I took this HTML file and replaced all curly quotes, apostrophes and em-dashes with the HTML tags. This second file (also in the Zip) displayed correctly in FBReader.

I don't mean to pick on just FBReader. I have also seen other programs not display extended ASCII characters correctly. I would think that using the HTML tags for these characters should display correctly, in all cases. As I mentioned in the other thread, I think this problem is due to the different interpretation of these characters, depending on the language and code page used (or the improper interpretation by the software - I don't know which).