Apostrophe replaced by �

Check that the correct character encoding is in use; if you are using the wrong one, characters such as curly quotes and apostrophes may be displayed incorrectly. This issue does not affect straight quotes and apostrophes.

(15231)

Ok, I have Firefox set using unicode (utf-8) and as
far as I know that hasn't been changed since I
started using the program.

If you view a badly coded page which contains Latin-1 curly apostrophe's, but fails to indicate it is in Latin-1, you will see junk. If you go to View > Encoding and switch to Latin-1, does it look right? Can you provide a url?

Mail is set to use
atomatic, so I don't think there should be any
problem with that.

Email also must have an encoding indicator in the message to tell Mail how to display things, and sometimes this gets omitted. If you go to Message > Text Encoding and select Latin-1 (or maybe UTF-8), does that fix things?

Also, I think that the apostraphes were plain, or
straight as you put it, so this might not even be my
problem. And it is only the apostrophes, nothing else
seems to be changed.

It's not possible to have a problem with plain apostrophes. Only curly ones, because there are three different ways to encode them -- Mac, Windows, and Unicode. And it is quite possible to only have a problem with apostrophe's, if your text does not contain other curly punctuation such as quotation marks or dashes.

latin-1 changed the symbols, but
they were still junk

Could you tell me (or paste here) what the symbols were with the encoding switched to iso latin 1 and windows latin 1 and Mac OS Roman? Thanks!

There's no connection between straight/curly punctuation and plain/rich text. Plain text can have both straight and curly.

This are the symbols that I am seeing in mail. Text
encoding is as follows:

Automatic, Western (ISO Latin 1), and Western
(Windows Latin 1) �

Western (Mac OS Roman) ÔøΩ

Thanks. It does not seem to be the simple kind of misreading of curly punctuation after all. These symbols represent the bytes for the Unicode replacement character, FFFD, which is used when a character in uninterpretable. I'm not sure how this would get in your text -- perhaps some kind of corruption at the other end. Could you email me an example of a message that has this in it (tom at bluesky dot org)?

Ok, so what is curly punctuation?

They are just additional characters you can put in any text. You make straight apostrophe (Unicode number 27) with the apostrophe key ', and you make a curly apostrophe (Unicode number 2019) with Option + Shift + ] ’.

Thanks for providing samples of the email texts containing the ï¿1⁄2.

My best guess is that this is being generated when the ellipsis (3 periods) character sent by you, and encoded by Mail as Win-1252, is quoted by the recipient and sent back to you in an incompatible encoding, such as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8. The Win-1252 ellipsis code is illegal in those charsets, and so an "unknown character" item is created, which becomes ï¿1⁄2 at your end.

Possible fixes might be to use periods instead of the ellipsis or manually set the encoding of outgoings to UTF-8.

I think the same thing would probably happen with curly apostrophe if you used it.

The case of Firefox remains a mystery. If you come across a page with this, send the url and I'll have a look.

It seems rather lame that you can't set mail to just
use UTF-8, instead of automaticly choosing what it
thinks is best.

There is a way to try and do that. Quit Mail and open Terminal and type the following (plus Return):

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"

Another way to force UTF-8 is to include a Unicode dingbat in the body of the message, such as Character Palette 2701.