The Pub Discussion Board

CreepyUnclePete wrote:

I uploaded the first chapter of "Glenda's Grandkids" as a TXT file in windows / ANSI format but the site displays the quote " " characters as question marks ?

Any suggestions?

"ANSI" is not actually a format.  It's an alias.  And that's the problem.

On Windows (your machine), it's an alias to, I believe, the "Windows 1252" character encoding.
On Linux (the web server), it's an alias to "Latin 1".

Because these two do not agree (and cannot be made to agree), the file doesn't get reproduced properly.

Solutions to this problem:

1. In your word processor, set the file to save as UTF-8 format, rather than ANSI.  (I cannot tell you how to do this, as I don't know what program you're using... and probably wouldn't know how to do it anyway, since I almost certainly don't use that program myself.)

2. If you cannot figure out how to tell your word processor to save as UTF-8, you can use Notepad as a converter.  Open your text file in Notepad, then go to Save As...  At the bottom of the dialog, there's a drop-down menu to choose the encoding.  Select UTF-8, then save the file.

3. Final option, not recommended (since it leaves the file in the wrong encoding):  If you refuse to do either of the above, your only remaining recourse is to remove all extended characters from your file.  By "extended", I basically mean any character that isn't on your physical keyboard.  Curly quotes are extended characters, and so will not get properly interpreted.  Regular quotation marks are part of the standard ASCII set, and so are recognized by virtually every character encoding.

Whatever method you use, just remember that UTF-8 is always the preferred character encoding, not just here, but pretty much everywhere.  It is designed as a universal encoding, which defines characters for myriad languages, different symbologies, and even emojis.

Please let me know if you need any further assistance.

Eric Storm

I'm not comfortable with HTML files yet, and have had many issues with them on other sites.

Saving and uploading as TXT /  UTF-8 fixed the issue.

Thank you!

If you have the ability, ALWAYS use HTML.  The results will be preferable virtually 100% of the time.

When dealing with TXT files, the site converts ANY line break into an HTML "<br>" tag.  This can start to look very ugly, depending on how the text file was originally generated.

There's no guarantee the HTML file will look perfect, either... but it has a better chance of looking good than TXT files do.

Eric Storm