Those Annoying, Strange Characters in Your Text

When Mac and PC users collaborate online, exchanging text documents, sometimes they experience annoying problems with characters:  strange ones that creep into the copy.  My Interfaith Tech Associate and Mac guru, Mike Bailey, explains the cause of this problem, and what you can do about it:

First, the standard character set between Macs and PCs is different.  The same ASCII code will display differently on Macs and PCs. The  situation is compounded when the same font is not present on both machines; and this is independent of whether it is Macs or PCs. The  receiving computer will attempt to substitute a comparable font, but  sometimes the results are not what you wanted. I won't even go into the problems with unicode (16 bit) character sets, which are often used in languages other than English. 

Secondly, some word processors, notably Microsoft Word, use supposedly non-printable codes to represent some special characters, such as the reverse quotation mark. The problem with these special characters is that they often end up printed when they are handled by other word processors or other operating systems.  This is particularly true when you use Microsoft's .doc file format. Anytime  you see a web page with stray $ signs in the text, it's a safe bet that they got there through Microsoft Word. This annoyance derives from Microsoft's penchant for using different standards than those used by the rest of the computing world. 

There are two ways of getting around these text handling problems: 

First, and in my mind the absolute best solution, is to print the file to a PDF file and then send that. PDF files not only have the content, they also contain the full character set used to produce the document, so the results will always look exactly the same on every machine, regardless of platform, printer, or fonts. PDFs are even editable if the recipient has Adobe Acrobat Pro and the file is not locked. On a Mac, printing to PDF is easy and built-in, because everything you see on the screen is generated from a PDF image. For PC users, regretably, PDFs are not a built-in feature.

Here's option number two:  If it is important that your recipient be able to edit the file you send, for instance, when you submit an article to a newspaper or magazine, then you can save the file in Rich Text Format (.rtf). You will generally find this format option under the "save as" command in your word processing program. When you use the .rtf format you will lose all of the automatic numbering, fancy column options, tables, etc., but--and here's the good part--you will also lose all the font fillips that caused the annoying odd ball characters in the first place. In exchange for some losses your recipient will get a file that is in the most universal file format available. He or she can then format the text, putting in as much fancy stuff as desired.

This article written by TCDavis

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