Doug (tanstaafl) has just alerted me to the fact that some of my posts (as well as others) appear in weird fonts, sometimes making them unreadable. Other times a font difference will make my edits obvious. Has anyone else seen this? I work with two different browsers and my posts always look fine here, but apparently that's not the case across the boards.

His theory (and I'd guess it's accurate) is that there is a problem posting to the BBS from a third-party application. For longer posts (yes, those religion/political threads!) I often write them in MS Word before posting in order to double-check my spelling and grammar (obsessive, I know, but bad spelling and grammar can kill a good point).

So could there be a problem pasting from MS Word into the BBS? (Also, when I post at home I frequently use my email client KMail to double check my spelling).

I've not seen anything, but I can believe that a Word-IE-IE chain could do that.

You could try using Notepad instead to play it safe.

You could try using Notepad instead to play it safe.

I think he was using MS Word to take advantage of the spell checker so I don't think notepad is an option.

IESpell?

I second IESpell

I really don't see how that could carry over to the BBS. That is, unless there are tags for the BBS that get stored when the post is submitted. I just don't see how text in a database field would be affected by the crazy stuff that Word does. Word would have to know what codes affect the appearance of fonts in this specific system and add them accordingly, wouldn't it? That just seems strange to me.

Do you have a link to a specific post? With that, I can take a look directly in the database and see.

It's very possible Word-IE posts are carying over some weird tags that the boards aren't stripping out, and only show back up for people with IE and Office on the same system. I personally browse the boards here with Safari, Omniweb or Firefox and haven't noticed anything strange.

Ah, hadn't thought about it converting back on the other end. Sorry. Still, I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary in any of your posts, and I have IE and Office.

Doug may want to chime in here (since I haven't seen the problem myself), but I believe this post exhibited some of the behavior.

IESpell?

Probably not an option where I work. Mordoc and friends don't let us install third-party software that isn't "essential to the completion of our jobs" and are very sensitive about IE related software, insisting that it could be spyware. So the IE spell is out, as is the google toolbar (not that it address my problem, but it is another usefull thing I'm not supposed to use). Imagine if they new my car stereo was really another computer with ethernet and the whole bit; they'd probally blow a gasket that I even bring it inside, much less hook it up (via USB of course)!

I think he was using MS Word to take advantage of the spell checker so I don't think notepad is an option.

True statement. I suppose I could use notepad as an intermediary step, though. I also could just learn to spell .

Actually my spelling and grammar aren't really that bad and usually I don't fix much; it just eases my mind to know I've double-checked my work!

... eases my mind to know I've double-checked my work!

I applaud you, sir!

That post looks perfectly fine to me. In fact, I was going to say that your posts are more normal than most, since you don't often use bold or italics. There's bold text in that post, but it appears to be in the places you intended.

Doug may want to chime in here

Below is an excerpt from that post that appears (in my browser) in a different slightly smaller, serifed font. I'd bet that this was a sentence edited before the post was pasted to the bbs.

converse is that if I’d suffered in silence I’d always have existed in the shadow of my “manager”.


Below is the next paragraph from that post where the words on the ends of the lines are missing when displayed on my screen -- but after copying it to my clipboard and pasting it here, all the words are present.

-You always pay a price for going over someone's head. It's up to you if this is worth it, but even if the issue is "resolved" (as it was in my case) it will always be known that you skipped a level- not just the person that was skipped but to the others around you. I was definitely branded for a time as a person who'd "run to the boss" when there was an issue. However, the future bore my stance out and I have weathered the storm well enough.

Interestingly enough... if I expand that browser window to full screen, the words at the far right of each line are still missing (but only in that one paragraph) and of course they are different words because the line breaks are in different places. Then, when I bring the window back out of full screen mode and back to "normal window" mode -- the whole paragraph is in that smaller, serifed font and all of the words are now present. Then, if I use the scroll wheel on the mouse and scroll that post out of view and then scroll it back into view, it's back the way it was originally, with the one sentence in the different font and the words missing at the ends of the lines in the next paragraph.

There is other weirdness in that post as well -- such as the line that says

I know my issue wasn’t spot on with what you’re dealing with, but I learned a lot and hope it’s helpful.


that, depending on whether the post is displayed "fresh" or re-displayed after being full-screen and then back to normal window, or re-displayed after scrolling out of it and back into it, or even just being weird and then highlighted with the mouse and magically becoming normal -- this line can be everything from perfectly readable to non-ascii gibberish.

Only Jeff (Ferret Boy's) posts and at least one, possibly two other people's posts exhibit this behavior. That's about all I can tell you about it...

tanstaafl.

What would help is a screen capture of what you're seeing. For example, here's what I see:


As you can see, I'm not seeing the same thing you are.

*edit*
Also, I don't see anything in the source code that would cause this. I still don't see how this is possible.

I see exactly the same problem with some posts on the BBS (odd font and text overflowing without a scrollbar), but oddly not on the post that was linked to in this thread. I haven't seen one for a week or so though, so I can't point to a post that I have problems with.

I'm using IE6 SP1 on both Win2k and WinXP.

I've never had this problem and I'm using IE6 SP1 on XP

As an aside, it's quite an odd feeling (not bad, just odd!) having my words isolated like this. I'm just glad it wasn't one of my many debate posts!

As for what's going on, I have no clue. Doug also indicated he'd seen this with one of my more recent posts, which I first pasted to notepad, copied it out, and pasted to the BBS.

What would help is a screen capture of what you're seeing

OK, here is an attached .jpg screen capture.

I'm almost but not quite smart enough to figure out how to put the picture right into the post, so you'll have to click on the attachment link above.

In this screen capture, none of the lines are truncated because I went full screen and back to window view to cause the one line to go non-ascii. If I played with it a bit I could get screen captures of truncated lines, and even different lines that are non-ascii. The non-ascii lines are always one of the lines (I don't think ever more than one) that show up in the different font.

And, again, it is just FerretBoy and one or two others that exhibit this behavior. Jeff -- are you posting from a Linux machine? It seems to me that one of the other "problem posters" was someone I thought waas likely on a Linux machine -- maybe Bitt?

Anyway, my screen capture will show that I'm not just making this up!

edit: Well, maybe not. The .jpg looked just fine in the "Paint" program where I saved it, but by the time it got to the bbs as an attachment, it's all scrunched up and you can't tell anything from it. Oh, wait -- if you right-click the link and save the picture to your computer, you can view it full size and then you can see what it is doing.

tanstaafl.

Wow that's weird. To me, it looks like there's about 4 different fonts in there! The text in bold doesn't even look like any of the other fonts.

Weeeeeeeeeird.

I post mostly from a Sparc Solaris machine with Mozilla, though right now from MacOSX with OmniWeb. Very occasionally from Windows using either IE, Mozilla, or Fire{Bird,Fox}.

I'd guess that there's something wrong with your OS installation, especially given how that one line is split in two horizontally, with one font above and a different one below. Have you run a spyware catcher lately? Are your virus definitions up-to-date?

BTW, the reason it looked ``scrunched up'' was because if you load a raw picture in IE, it ``helpfully'' resizes it to fit in your window. If you hover over it long enough, there'll be a button to expand it to full size; it looks like a picture with four arrows pointing out of it, IIRC. (I point out the look of the button because, again, IIRC, there are multiple buttons that pop up.)

Jeff -- are you posting from a Linux machine?

I am at home, but the posts you have identified were from work, where I'm on Windows 2000.

I think you're machine is trying to protect you from my fundamentalist opinions

That is exactly what happens on posts my copies of IE object to as well. Very curious.

And, again, it is just FerretBoy and one or two others that exhibit this behavior.

Hmmm. I think the smoking gun here is the sexed quotes (U+201C, U+201D) on the "manager" line. (Except they're in there at their CP1252 codepoints, not their Unicode codepoints). It looks like IE (or, more likely, the GDI itself) gets confused when asked to render those characters in the sans font, and fails over to the serif one. Round-tripping that text via Word is likely to have introduced sexed quotes where there were none before. In that particular post of FerretBoy's, "manager" and "my issue wasn't spot on" have sexed quotes, "resolved" and "a price for going over someone's" have unsexed quotes (U+0022, U+0027). So Doug, your font is shagged; FerretBoy, you're sending characters that only look right in CP1252; and Drakino, the BBS is advertising its pages as ISO-8859-1 but is illicitly serving octets in the range 0x80..0x9F. The Right Thing would be (a) serve BBS content in UTF-8, or (b) arrange for characters that are submitted in CP1252 to be echoed back as their HTML entities -- &ldquo, &rsquo etc.

Edit: And Bitt, you're scarcely better, with your U+0060 spacing grave accents.

Peter

I think the smoking gun here is the sexed quotes

Good catch! I think this must be it, as another example Doug sent me also had a word quoted in the line. The only confusing thing is that in this second instance I'd actually pasted to notepad first, then copied it again from there and pasted it into the BBS. Would the quotes have retained their codes even through that path?

The only confusing thing is that in this second instance I'd actually pasted to notepad first, then copied it again from there and pasted it into the BBS. Would the quotes have retained their codes even through that path?

AFAICT Notepad wouldn't have introduced sexed quotes, but it would certainly have preserved ones introduced by Word.

Peter

AFAICT Notepad wouldn't have introduced sexed quotes, but it would certainly have preserved ones introduced by Word.

Ah, you learn something new every day!

Bitt, you're scarcely better, with your U+0060 spacing grave accents.

Too much TeX, and the BBS doesn't allow “.

At least it's in the right codeset.

I have a brail Screen all fonts look the same to me

So Doug, your font is shagged

I bet you are right.

If I look at that post on my home computer, it looks completely normal.

How do I un-shag my font? Can I just bring a copy of arial.ttf from home and copy it over the one I have at work?

tanstaafl.