Apostrophe etc converting to question mark in black diamond

I have read the related threads and do not see an actual answer to the problem other than the suggestion that I turn off Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes which does not make sense as everyone else here has it turned on. I am one user of many on
our system and only a few have this problem. When I send an email it looks fine. When I receive the reply back my apostrophes and 3 dots etc are replaced with a question mark inside a black diamond.

It's related to the character set and character encoding you are using and the easiest, sure-fire fix is to disable smart quotes. Using ISO-8859-1 encoding and a standard font should fix it too, but it may still be a problem for a few recipients. Using the
basic ACSII characters will guarantee it doesn't happen.
What encoding are you using? Look in File, Options, Advanced - near the bottom. Try Western European (ISO), not UTF-8.
What font do you use? Stick with one of the standard fonts.
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Outlook & Exchange Solutions Center
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Question Mark in black diamond in Safari and Adobe Lightroom

I have a problem with the “question mark in black diamond” phenomenon noted elsewhere in these forums. My problem is different in certain aspects, though, and I’ve found nothing which suggests a way forward in other threads.
I get the “? in black diamond” appearing in two contexts:
(1) in the UI of the Web Module in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom when using the LRG One with PapPal Template (from lightroomgalleries.com), and selecting a currency symbol other than $ (i.e. when using £, EUR, or the Yen symbol)
(2) when viewing web pages generated by the Lightroom Web Module with the PayPal template in Safari
In both these contexts, the currency symbol is displayed as “? in black diamond” in place of the "£" symbol.
The strange thing about this is that when I view the output in other browsers (I’ve tried IE5 for Mac, Camino, Firefox, OmniWeb and Opera), the “£” currency symbol shows up ok. However, it can’t just be a Safari issue, as the “?” shows up in the Lightroom Web Module interface as well.
I’ve posted a screenshot of the Lightroom interface here: http://www.lochaberphoto.co.uk/currency.html , and an example of gallery output here: http://www.lochaberphoto.co.uk/test2/index.html (click on the left-hand thumbnail to bring up the image page and check out the dropdown menu beneath the image).
Before posting here, I’ve tried various forums relating to Lightroom (Adobe Lightroom U2U, lightroomgalleries.com, luminouslandscape.com) but to no avail.
So this is a last chance post: hopefully one of the OS X experts here may be able to suggest a reason for this (is it a font issue? or something to do with UTF-8, or Safari’s default encoding? – I’m not a coder, but I really want to find the answer so I’ll try just about anything…), and maybe a way to solve it. BTW, I get the same experience on my G4 iMac and my MacPro, so I guess it’s not an Intel-specific issue.
Thanks in anticipation for any answers, or follow-up questions
Jim

Hi Tom
Thanks for this. I've tried previously changing the Default encoding in Safari Prefs to Western (ISO Latin 1), but found that did not help.
Following your advice I tried changing encoding from the View menu, and find that the £-sign displays correctly in both ISO Latin 1 and MacRoman (though not in UTF-8). The odd thing about this is that with Default Encoding in the Prefs set to either of those, I still get the ? until I go into the View menu and change from Default to Latin 1 or MacRoman, whereupon the £-sign shows up! Can't imagine how that can be. Tried closing and re-opening Safari after setting Pref to Roman 1, but still need to use the View menu to get the £-sign. Restaring the Mac doesn't help either.
So, Tom, with your help I now have a viable workaround, but as this is going to remain an issue for other Mac/ Safari users visiting my site, I'd like to find a way of preventing it happening. Can you suggest how it can be that Safari needs to be told twice (in Prefs and in View menu) to use ISO Latin 1 or MacRoman before it does so?
Look forward to any further comments
Jim
(P.S.: It seems to me this must be linked to the fact that the ? shows up in the Lightroom interface, and that the fault lies with the PayPal gallery Template I'm using. So I'm wondering if there's anything you - or anyone else - can suggest that I can put to the developer of the Template which will enable him to resolve the issue - he's a Windows user, but has made one suggestion that I adapt the encoding in a file called transformer.xslt from it's default of ISO_8859-15 to UTF-8. I've tried that and tried also ISO_8859-1, but the issue persists regardless.)

Why are some websites displayed with added question marks inside black diamonds

Numbers are displayed with question marks inside black triangles before and following, possibly as column separators.
== This happened ==
Every time Firefox opened
== I attempted to access financial websites

Can you post a link?
You can try a few different encoding settings: "View > Character Encoding" like Western ISO-8859-1 or another Western encoding or UTF-8
You can also try to switch on Auto-Detect: "View > Character Encoding > AutoDetect > Universal"
A diamond with a '?' usually indicates that a character is missing in the font that is used on a website or the wrong encoding is used.
You get the '?' on websites that use an 8 bit encoding like ISO-8859-1 or a Windows encoding like Windows-1252.
This issue can happen if content was copied from one 8 bit or Unicode encoding to another encoding.

Why do arrows convert to question marks?

I created a flow chart in Excel that contains many arrows. When I create a PDF, all of the arrows convert to question marks. Why? How can I fix this?
I am using Adobe Acrobat 5.0, Adobe Reader X, Windows XP on a Dell Vostro 1510. Also, the arrows were created in Excel by going to "Insert", then "Symbol", with the Ariel font selected.
Thank you for your help!

I am posting to the list in case others might have a clue. However, it may be that the differences are related to the fact that to create a PDF with AA5 on this Windows machine, I have to print to file and then use Distiller. You are able to print directly to the printer. You might try the print to file and then open the file in Distiller to see if you get the same result. I just printed directly to PDF on AA5 from Open office and got the same result, so I do not know what you have different. Here are the sceen shots:
Your MetaData:
My MetaData:
There are two different printers available (I deleted the PDFWriter from my AA5 installations. I just did a print to the Acrobat Distiller printer and PDF Writer for AA4. The PDF Writer did give results similar to yours (actually Acrobat PDFWriter 5.0) and the AD printer worked fine. It has been so long since I dealt with this issue I had forgotten the problems. The bottom line is to not use PDF Writer, but use the Acrobat Distiller printer. The problems you are having is one of the many reasons Adobe quit distributing PDF Writer with AA6. With AA5 it was only available with a custom install. Font embedding was one of the major problems with PDF Writer.
Recommendation: Print to the Acrobat Distiller printer and ignore PDFWriter from now on. Go to Start>Printers and right click on the AD to get to the printer preferences. You may have to go to a second menu layer from the general tab, but you should be able to find the settings tab. There select the Print settings as the default so that all fonts are embedded. This should solve your problem. Sorry it took so long to remember about PDFWriter.
Bill

Character encoding problem. Question mark in a diamond??

I have gotten this a few times before, but it usually fixes when I switch the encoding. This time absolutely nothing is working. In browsers like Safari, you can see what the black diamond and question mark really is. It's just supposed to be an alt-bullet. If I copy and past it, it turns out fine. I included the url of the site affected. My encoding is currently on Western (ISO-8859-1) and the auto detect is on universal. Anyone have a solution

I assume hat you mean this character: • (&#x2022;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_%28typography%29
If you see a Question mark in a diamond then that means that the font that Firefox uses doesn't map that character.
It is in a code block with: font-family: courier new,Verdana,Arial;<br />
You can check those fonts

Apostrophes are replaced by question marks in output string?

Hi Guys
I think this is an encoding problem but I cannot find it in the forum archives. My apostrophes are being replaced by question marks on my jsp output?
Any idea why and how to get them back to apostrophes
Cheers, ADC

Guys, the 3rd party product has no trouble at all
showing the apostrophes from the self-same database
that I get question marks from.
This MUST be an encoding issue, so anyone that knows
about encoding and changing it please could you
suggest something. You can take for granted that one
way or another the character in the database IS an
apostrophe as verified by viewing it via the 3rd party
product we have.You said...
In the SQL database view they come out as squares
Were you referring to the normal applications that are available for viewing data for the database (like SQL*Plus or Enterprise Manager?)
If yes, then if it was me then I would presume it was not an apostrophe and that the third party tool was mapping the real character to an apostrophe. A 'square' indicates an unusual character in viewers.
Are you using EBCDIC? Unless EBCDIC is involved apostrophe has the same value in most if not all character sets because ANSI forms the lower range for most character sets. I know for example that Korean, Japanese and Chinese character sets use ANSI, as does unicode (with padded zeros for the wider ranges.)

Converting creates question marks in boxes

When converting a document in Access whether printing to pdf or converting within the document, the pdf is scattered with small question marks in boxes (see pic below). Windows 7, Office 2013, Adobe 11 Professional with latest updates. Only happens on one workstation. Any ideas?

Apple won't respond to your query. If you want a response you'll need to call Apple Care.
Something else you can try is cleaning the system cache files. There are a number of products that do this - I use OnyX. There is no charge for the software, but I believe the developer asks for a donation.
It's very easy to use. I run it twice a month. Once it is installed, you would double click on the OnyX icon in your application folder (or drag an icon to your dock for quick access) to open the application. After entering your administrator password, you would select "automation". The panel looks like this:
Select the same items I have checked, except for "repair permissions" as you have already done this step. Also, select in the cache section "system and kernel" and then select "execute". The program takes about 5 to 10 minutes to run. Leave your computer alone, that is don't use it for anything else until OnyX is finished. Once complete, restart the computer and try Safari.

Character recognition results in question marks using CuteFTP

I'm have trouble with character recognition when I upload my site to Network Solutions using CuteFTP. Some returns, apostrophies, etc. appear as question marks. I have tried changing the prefernces to Macbinary and to binary without any change. Any suggestions?

For my own education...
Would my solution have worked?
I realize that it's not a true fix. It's a
workaround. However, I'd like to know if it would
have made a difference.
Yes, if you confine your text to pure ascii, without any "smart" punctuation, that may work. However, the templates often have other non-punctuation characters in them already that cause the same kind of problem and removing all of them could be really tedious.

Question marks replace apostrophes and quote marks incontextediting

Every time a client (www.edpilolla.com) pushes "Done" in InContextEditing, all of the quotation and apostrophe marks are converted to question marks.
EXAMPLE: "Please answer my question or I'll be stumped." Becomes: ?Please answer my question or I?ll be stumped.?
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What do I need to do so that this client can edit pages with incontextediting without quotation marks and apostrophes becoming question marks after he pushes "Done"?

In your HTML...
Change this line:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
to this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
that should fix the issue. Good luck & let me know how it works out for you.
-Tommy

Slideshow controls are shown as question marks

I know since the end of MobileMe the pop up slideshow doesn't work properly. I'm trying to fix the missing controls. When you click play slideshow, the slideshow pops up, but at the bottom, the play/pause, etc. controls are question marks. I've tried to follow Old Toad's tutorial listed here:
http://www.oldtoadstutorials.net/No.iW14.html
but I am still having problems.
I have mulptile sites in iweb that have already been published with slideshows. So, I need to fix all of them at this point. I've changed the item that he refers to in the tutorial and uploaded it to the website's server. I've tried putting in different folders; the scripts folder, the slideshow_files folder, just in the root folder, but it is not working. What am I missing? Any thoughts about what I need to try next. Thanks for your help!

If you are changing the script in the iWeb package you will need to republish every slideshow from iWeb for the updates to appear in the published version.
You could modify the local or remote versions of the file outside of iWeb but you would need to do this every time you publish changes to your site. See [2]...
http://www.iwebformusicians.com/Banner-Slideshow/iWeb-Slideshow-Assets.html

German umlauts into question marks

Hi,
The problem is that the German umlauts are converted to question marks . I create a mail message (see below). After the ship in here: Outlook 2010 can be seen, the German umlauts as question marks.
Gesch?ftsf?hrer: ....
RG M?nchen ....
mailmessage obj_message
s_mapi_connector = 'SMTP:'
obj_message.notetext = struct_drucker.s_email_message
obj_message.recipient[l].address = s_mapi_connector + s_email_adress
obj_message.recipient[l].recipienttype = mailto!
obj_message.recipient[l].name = s_email_recipient
// Email per MAPI-Client
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en_result = obj_session.mailLogon(mailNewSession!)
en_result = obj_session.mailsend(obj_message)
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DESTROY obj_session
Does anyone know a solution?
Thank You
André Rust

Hi André,
Here is my code (also tested successfully with PB12.5.2 build 5703):
mailSession l_mailSession
mailMessage l_mailMessage
l_mailMessage.Recipient [1].Name = "[email protected]"
l_mailMessage.Recipient [1].RecipientType = mailTo!
l_mailMessage.receiptrequested=TRUE
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l_mailMessage.noteText = "Bla,~nbla, bla, ...~n"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "~n"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "Meßgröße"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "~n"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "Rückäußerung"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "~n"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "Rückstöße"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "~n"
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l_mailMessage.noteText += "~n"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "rüstungsmäßig"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "~n"
l_mailMessage.noteText += "überläßt"
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l_mailMessage.noteText += "äußerst"
l_mailSession = CREATE mailSession
if l_mailSession.mailLogon () <> mailReturnSuccess! then
MessageBox ("E-mail error!", "Login failed!", Exclamation!)
else
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MessageBox ("E-mail error!", "Sending failed!", Exclamation!)
else
MessageBox ("E-mail report!", "Message sent!", Information!)
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end if
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Every once in a while when I open my mail or a page I get nothing but strange lines of symbols. Many of the symbols are black triangles with question marks in the center. I completely reset it like new, but problem still exists

Every once in a while when I open my mail or open a page I get lines of strange symbols like black triangles with question marks in the center. I have reset the ipad2 to new condition but the problem still exists.

A reset does not make tthe iPad "like new."
First, let's ensure that we agree on just what is a Reset...
Hold down the on/off switch and the Home button simultaneously until you see the Apple logo. Ignore the "Slide to power off" text if it appears. You will not lose any apps, data, music, movies, settings, etc.
If the Reset doesn't work, try a Restore. Note that it's nowhere near as quick as a Reset. Connect via cable to the computer that you use for sync. From iTunes, select the iPad/iPod and then select the Summary tab. Follow directions for Restore and be sure to say "yes" to the backup. You will be warned that all data (apps, music, movies, etc.) will be erased but, as the Restore finishes, you will be asked if you wish the contents of the backup to be copied to the iPad/iPod. Again, say "yes."
At the end of the basic Restore, you will be asked if you wish to sync the iPad/iPod. As before, say "yes." Note that that sync selection will disappear and the Restore will end if you do not respond within a reasonable time. If that happens, only the apps that are part of the IOS will appear on your device. Corrective action is simple - choose manual "Sync" from the bottom right of iTunes.
If you're unable to do the Restore, go into Recovery Mode per the instructions here.

Black Screen, Grey Screen, then flashing question mark, now frozen....

hi everyone,
i know i have probably the most common problem - and i've tried to read all about the logic board problems which i'm fairly certain i have.
I realize i will most likely have to buy a new macbook - but before i do - i need to retrieve files that are on my ibook g3 (bought in early 2003).
This is what has happened in the past 2 days:
1. I can hear the power start up (and chimes) but screen is completely black.
2. Tried resetting PRAM and PMU, now blank grey screen sometimes appears.
3. Now, grey screen with flashing question mark in the middle alternating with mac face. So i assumed this meant it couldn't locate my hard drive. So i found my ibook install disc and inserted it and restarted while holding down "C" key.
4. Grey screen - with Apple (thought this was success) - then it turned to a large grey circle with a line through it (a slash). And then suddenly frozen.
Since then it has just been a lot of lines through the screen alternating with completely grey screen, etc. along with any of the above-mentioned outcomes. I tried pushing on the lower-left-hand corner of the computer and yes, it affects the display - more or less lines, etc.
How can i get my old files off of it? Do i buy a new macbook and connect them via fire wire cable and try that way? or will that not work if the above is happening? Or is it possible for someone (myself or perhaps IT professionals) to remove the hard drive from my old ibook and place it somewhere where i can copy over the files?
Any help is appreciated - i know this is a popular topic - i've just had so many weird outcomes in the past 2 days i'm not exactly sure which solution (if any) would work for me right now.
Thanks so much!

Hi Ronda -
I do have access to another mac (mini) with firewire at my work. Or I might go out and buy a new macbook this weekend as well (preferable since I don't really want my personal files on my work computer, etc.) But yes, i need to get my old files off of this one.
I have never added additional memory or anything to it really since I got it. So it should be the original specs:
iBook (14.1 LCD 900 MHz 32 VRAM)
256MB memory
Combo (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
Hard drive: 40GB
Not a lot of space was remaining if i recall. I did get the 'disk full' notice a few weeks ago, but i did end up deleting a lot of stuff. Needless to say, i'm sure it was quite full, but not at maximum when this happened.
Update: Last night i tried to start it up again, and it would ONLY go to a black screen this time (ie. no display at all). What do you think i should do?

Firefox is not displaying alt codes correctly, substituting a black diamond with a white question mark in their place.

Alt codes (such as ® for "registered" and  for "trademark") are being displayed as a small black diamond with a white question mark inside of it. This has also started happening to more simple characters such as exclamation marks, dashes and apostrophes.
Any ideas?

Thanks for your reply cor-el.
My posting actually included the alt code syntax, and is now rendered as the corresponding special character. I guess this isn't a surprise!
And no, it was rendered just fine. This morning when I went into the browser to see the problem, it was not mis-displaying as it had been...it had somehow changed and was behaving very nicely. That's all fine, but I'm a little bit wary of this FF browser functionality now...steady as she goes.
Also, I did check the (View > Character Encoding) you recommended, and after experimenting a bit discovered that using "Unicode (UTF-8)" made the wierd black diamond/white question mark character come back in all of the same places it was occuring...up until this morning. I've set my browser default to "Western (ISO-8859-1)" now, and everything is displaying as it should.
Thanks for your reply and suggestions. I hope others will learn from these experiences.

Question mark instead of apostrophe

In many webpages where there is supposed to be a apostrophe I see a blacked out question mark, as depicted below. Any ideas?
In the central system, for example, the MX-980 can trigger sophisticated smart macros, RS232 and relay controls via a centrally installed MSC-400 Master Controller. At each local system location, the MX-980 addresses an RF Base Station, like URC�s new MRF-260, which extends the remote�s range to 50 to 100 feet, and eliminates the line-of-sight requirement. In any room with a projector, lighting switch or other IR-controlled device not connected to a central MSC-400 or local MRF, the MX-980�s built-in IR signal is effective at a range of 30 to 50 feet.

Thanks for the reply. If, while in Safari, I click View:TextEncoding and choose Western ISO Latin 1, the fonts are normal. Choosing Unicode, Default or Western MAC OS, the fonts are not correct.
So, I figured I'd choose Western ISO Latin 1. Problem is, when I close Safari and re-open, it's back to Default and displays the fonts incorrectly again.
I guess I'm not sure which text encoding is proper for the United States and how to set that proper encoding as default.
Thanks for any more help you can provide.

Apostrophe etc converting to question mark in black diamond

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