markup icons displaying

[Ralph]

what are these black diamonds with question marks? How do I get rid of them?
Sample:
Dear Fellow MS�ers �
It is with a heavy heart that I relay the passing of Linda Wejcman, former
State Representative from our area. I�ll share information about services
when I know more. Linda had a good, compassionate heart and was a
Representative who consistently �fought the good fight.� She will be missed.

thank you for your help!

 

[Terry Farrell]

That looks like an incompatible font was used or a character set is missing.
It looks like smartquotes (curly quotation marks) are being substituted by
the � characters.

 

[Pamelia Caswell via OfficeKB.com]

This (�) is the character a browser (other programs could use it too)
displays when its font does not have the requested character. If you set
your browser encoding to Western (Windows-1252), you should see the quotes.
Note that if you do this, you won't see the many language and technical
characters that the universal character set (Unicode) can display (with, for
example, the UTF-8 encoding).


Why did this happen? The original document must have been created in Word,
or another Office product. Windows (well, Word) uses its own special
version of ASCII. Years ago, before Unicode, MS wanted to give its users an
easy way to get typographical quotes, so it used positions that in the
standard ASCII were were reserved for controls. Many software and operating
system vendors also use reserved area positions. The Unicode developers, who
were funded by a consortium of software and operating system vendors (among
them MS, Adobe, and Apple), settled on using the standard ASCII as the base
for Unicode.

Pam