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Response to Available Light and Not the Chili Peppers

from Allan Engelhardt (allane@cybaea.com)
Allan Engelhardt where are you!!? Why do my "'s" look like "B4s"?

-- Christel Green (look.no@film.dk), November 06, 2000.

I'm here. Was in Dublin for the week with limited internet access. Lost my T5 only to learn that they don't produce it anymore. Sad.

I see it is time to tell the Story of the Quotes. This is somewhat off-topic so please feel free to ignore. The chances of me getting the HTML right without preview are pretty slim...

In the beginning, there was the quotation mark (", ", ") and the apostrophe (', ') and the world was a happy and peaceful place.

Then there appeared the dreadded gravè (`, `) and accute (´, &180;) accents and the world decended into confusion.

Chaos reigned, and mighty giants walked the Earth. They included the terrible four-some: left- and right-, single- and double quote (‘, ’, “, ”) and the fearsome brothers low left single- and double quotes (‚, „).

These are terrible times indeed.

But back to your problem: B4 hexadecimal is 180 decimal. And the ASCII character with code 180 is, as we mentioned, the acute accent (´). So, my guess would be that you have changed your keyboard mapping so that the key labled with an apostrophe (', ASCII 39) sends an acute accent (ASCII 180) instead. The browser will convert this into hex (something like %B4 when it transmits it to Phil's little script which must ignore the % when it saves the message.

The solution is to send an apostrophe when you want an apostrophe and use ´ when you want an acute accent.

How do you change the keyboard mapping? I don't know -- it depends on your operating system. Windows has a control-panel thing that changes the whole mapping, but I don't think you can modify individual keys like you can on Unix. If you use unix, then check out xmodmap.

This was probably a lot more information than you wanted?

(posted 8538 days ago)

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