On Jan 20, 2005, at 2:32 PM, Gutenberg9443@aol.com wrote:
I know what he's talking about because I downloaded a copy of Kipling's story "The Brushwood Boy" a couple of weeks ago in .htm form and found a lot of rubbish characters in it, but I just read around them despite feeling rather exasperated. I had been seized with an acute wish to read the story at three AM, and after getting up, booting my computer etc., downloading it, putting it on my ebook reader, shutting everything down again, and going back to bed, my desire to redownload it at that time was nonexistent. Anyway, that could not possibly have been a recent post, though for all I know it might be a recent REpost. Most .htm files work just fine on that ebook reader.
It sounds like the file's bytes are being interpreted as the wrong text encoding. If I'm not mistaken, this is a problem with 8-bit ASCII, because there are various ways of using the upper 128 bits to represent characters. This especially is a problem with accented characters. Your correspondent may be using a program which assumes a different text encoding than is used in the PG files he has been opening. It may be assuming "Mac OS" encoding, when the text is in something else. This can also afflict text in an HTML file. If you go to a page in a foreign language, and the characters are not represented correctly even though you have a compatible font, it's probably the text encoding. On the Mac, the Safari browser has a submenu (View->Text Encoding) which allows you to select from a variety of text encodings. Find the right one, and the text will appear correct, without wrong characters or missing glyphs. This may be the problem with your ebook reader. Does it allow you to select the encoding used to interpret the html? Your friend in Thailand might also want to check for such a feature in his software. - Jon Hendry