My understanding is that the strange symbols are simply a result of the
"extended" characters. Since people wanted to use more than the
"standard" 128 ASCII charcaters, they started using characters with
eight bits instead of 7, numbered 128 - 255. Things like umlauts and
Angstron symbols and fancy quotes fall in this range. Unfortuanely,
programs that look for ASCII symbols drop the extra bit.
For example, fancy quotes are #210 and #211. Subtract 128 and you get
82 and 83, which are "R" & "S". So if you see "R" or "S" where you
don't expect them, somebody used fancy quotes in a word processor,
which your program couldn't recognize correctly.
--- Tim Folkerts
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Timothy J. Folkerts Tim.Folkerts@valpo.edu
Dept. of Physics & Astronomy 219-464-6634
Valparaiso University
Valparaiso, IN 46383