Thread: Lots of ???
View Single Post
Old 04-16-2011, 08:18 PM   #10
dwig
Wizard
dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.dwig ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
dwig's Avatar
 
Posts: 1,613
Karma: 6718541
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Paradise (Key West, FL)
Device: Current:Surface Go & Kindle 3 - Retired: DellV8p, Clie UX50, ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by ted13b View Post
...Is this caused by an improper file conversion?..
Possibly, they could be characters that the reader can't display and the reader is substituting a "?" to indicate the unknown character. This happens when font encoding it not properly handled during conversion or when things like Word's soft hyphens are embedded in the text. If so, there may be ways of "repairing" the file. Other posts have made reasonable suggestions to try.

They could also be real question marks, or all identical undisplayable characters, placed in the text by the OCR software that was used to convert scanned pages into actual text. If this is the case there is no way to fix the file by reprocessing it. You would have to manually edit the text and insert the correct characters.
dwig is offline   Reply With Quote