Question Mark in black diamond in Safari and Adobe Lightroom

Question

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

Answer 1

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.)