HM, this problem of the weird characters began with the introduction of
Internet Explorer version 8. As DavidF pointed out, you can get the text to
show normally by changing the code setting. So far, I have never encountered
a situation where I had to change from ISO to UTF, but I have had to switch
the other way around i.e.: from UTF to ISO.
Whatever the case maybe you can do this, but visitors to your site will have
the same problem and may not be aware of the encoding change facility.
The only way I know to overcome this problem is to enter the text in an HTML
fragment preceded by a font setting tag <font face="name your choice of font"
size=size of your choice color=#hexadecimal number of your chosen colour> and
place an end of font tag (</font>) after the text. You must make sure that
there is no blank space between the last letter of a word and the punctuation
mark that follows it or between an apostrophe and the letter preceding it.
You must also replace any foreign character, that is a character which is
not standard in English, such as accented vowels or consonants, by a standard
HTML six digits code (for example #&252; stands for the German lower case u
umlaut). You may also need to place a few line-break tags <br> in order to
set out paragraphs.
Then the text will appear as it should. But you must have realised by now
that it is a tedious and ineffective way of doing it. Perhaps somebody on
this forum will give us the benefit of their knowledge and show us a less
cumbersome way to do it.
I have had perform this procedure on half-a-dozen book-chapter length texts
in a foreign language and it proved very arduous. After the second text, I
developped a technique that considerably simplified the task. I inserted the
text in a WORD document and used the "Replace" function to insert the codes.
then copied and pasted the coded text in the HTML fragment on Publisher. Then
all I had to do was to add a few tags.
