[AT] Some ads from the 7/31 Lancaster Farming

[Bob McNitt]

I think Mike's right about the character format oddities. For example: 
when I was editing magazines, we used the Quark program (by Apple) to do 
page layouts. All text that wasn't in a Mac format had to be first 
converted to plain text before scrolling it into a page window. Then on 
the flip side, if you tried copying and pasting any Mac text to either 
Microsoft Word, plain text or other formats, you got special character 
symbols rather than letters or punctuation. Sounds more complicated that 
it is or was. Since then both Apple & Microsoft have gotten much more 
compatible formats that share common traits. I suspect the program 
they're (Lancaster Farming) using for the ad layouts is an older one 
that can't handle certain letter and punctuation conversions that are 
recognized when included in I-net messages or some browsers.
Bob

On 8/1/2010 10:47 AM, Mike Sloane wrote:
> If you are using a MS Windows operating system, Charlie, you have those
> characters. Just go to "Accessories", then "System Tools", then
> "Character Map". That will show you all the special characters and the
> keystrokes needed to print them. For instance of you want to show 80°,
> you need to type "80" and then hold down the "alt" key while hitting
> "248" on the number pad to the right (NOT above the letters). That's my
> 2¢ worth (<alt>  0162). :-)
>
> But, the more I think about it, the Lancaster Farming problem is more
> likely the result of a problem with their OCR (Optical Character
> Recognition) application failing to read the printed version of the ads
> and just substituting nonsense characters in order to alert the operator
> to a problem (which is obviously being ignored).
>
> What the problem is with your correspondents' messages is anyone's
> guess. One possible cause might be "noisy" telephone lines, although the
> nature of TCP/IP protocol is supposed to eliminate the problem of
> "garbled" messages.
>
> Mike
>
> On 8/1/2010 9:19 AM, charlie hill wrote:
>    
>> Hi Mike,  I wasn't criticizing your good work and I guess I used the
>> wrong example but I often see that.
>> Stuff printed in characters that I don't even have on my keyboard and I
>> just wondered how it happens.
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------
>> From: "Mike Sloane"<mikesloane at verizon.net>
>> Sent: Sunday, August 01, 2010 6:27 AM
>> To: "Antique tractor email discussion group"<at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
>> Subject: Re: [AT] Some ads from the 7/31 Lancaster Farming
>>
>>      
>>> In this particular case, Charlie, that is the way they show up in the
>>> on-line ads. I use Firefox browser, and I checked to see if MS Internet
>>> Explorer shows up the same way - that used to be a common problem, but
>>> it isn't here, the odd characters still show up. So it isn't a problem
>>> at your end; Lancaster Farming is probably using some kind of antique
>>> application to either scan the printed ads or upload them to the server.
>>>
>>> Mike
>>>        
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