[Info-vax] OT: HP Poised to merge PC and printer divisions

[Paul Sture]

On Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:41:01 -0600, Bob Koehler wrote:

> In article <7iro39-sn7.ln1 at news.sture.ch>, Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch>
> writes:
> 
>>  understanding H.P.b<X80><X99>s businesses,
>                      
>    Yep, that could be hard to understand.  Niehter my VT nor my PC can
>    figure that one out.

Caught by copying and pasting, I'm afraid.  According to the bottom of 
the following page, that's unicode for apostrophe:

<http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/1094/>

"Check your apostrophes, too

While I’m on the subject, the same rule applies to apostrophes. An 
apostrophe should not appear as a straight up-and-down character — that 
is a prime, and it is meant for writing measurements. When you are 
feeling possessive, or need to use a contraction, use ’ to write an 
apostrophe (')."

I've gone against his advice and knobbled the apostrophe in the quote :-) 

Various software tries too hard to mimic typesetting and "what looks 
pretty" IMHO.  You've probably comes across Word and other programs 
changing double quotes to curly quotes, but OpenOffice takes this a step 
further: by default it silently converts "-" to emdash.  That might be 
fine for the Write component of OO, but it does it in the spreadsheet 
component as well.  Oops, there went my database integrity...

No prizes for guessing how I found that one out.

-- 
Paul Sture