Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Technical Help and How To's Text

For some reason, the last few times I've received a text file, I've gotten something weird - maybe computer code. I can read the words but they are all scrunched up and there are lots of rectangle boxes mixed in. Anybody have any suggestions as to why this is happening?

I've sent you an email. The boxes are characters your text editor doesn't have characters for. The scrunching together - I assume you mean the line-breaks have disappeared?

Again, your text editor is misreading the end-of-line codes.

We could be talking about a Windows to Mac thing or some other coding mismatch (ANSI vs OEM or ASCII, or something like that.) Odd characters showing up in place of quotes is evidence of the same thing - the word processor is showing different characters for the same code because the characters are mapped out differently.

This can happen between old and new versions of the same program, different word processors or any other number of reasons.

I haven't found a one-size-fits-all solution.