Originally Posted by planets:
“what's a "windows alt character" ?
the character after "has flown in " is a square on my computer is it different on yours?”
This gets weirder - I've just looked closely at the b/w smiley I can see, and it's larger and got a square mouth - a grimace. And that's not a Windows character at all!!!!
Here's that bit as I see it:
has flown in😱
If all you get is a square empty shape, that means you don't have the font to show the character correctly. So you've not got the same basic font set I have. But I can't see how people can use different font sets on DS - it's a default for the web site. For example:
here's a pasted piece from a document I'm working on -
[FONT="]The following is a chronology of the events
[/FONT]
In my Word document, that's in Calibri 11pt, but the DS message box has defaulted it to the site standard. If I change it to Algerian 11pt, this is what happens in the message -
[FONT=Algerian]The following is a chronology of the events[/FONT].
Nothing. You can't change the default font for a message.
So how the heck did that smiley happen?


I had this problem last night with a post on the music forum. I quoted something that was in bold, and the [ quote ] bit was bolded in my post, showed onscreen, and split the quote into multiple blue boxes. When I altered it in the preview edit box, it just came back the same. I only sorted it by deleting the quotes entirely and putting them back in by hand.
The above scribble is why it's rubbish putting together a post in Word first and pasting it in. You get millions of stupid bracketed code things scattered through the post which have to be cut out
Windows Alt characters are the ancient mystical way to access characters that aren't on the keyboard - umlaut characters, Old English, fractions, scientific, Arabic etc. If you have a numeric keypad you can hold down the Alt key and type a 3-figure number which corresponds to a character, and it goes into your document. See
http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/accents/codealt.html
The easiest way to do those though are by using the Windows system programme 'charmap.exe' from your Windows 'run program' option on the start menu. Brings up a little box with all the available characters and you can cut and paste them. Like this:
ᾫ ὤ Ố ᵺ ٸ
That smiley is going to drive me bloody mad, I know it!



I'm getting a headache

BTW- that smiley is not an emoticon - I've deliberately put 10 smileys in. If it was one, the message would have been rejected for too many smileys.