SC - My First Feast

[Mordonna22@aol.com]

Anahita asked: 
> As often happens, i find myself reading a recipe sent to the list in 
> which, instead of fractions, i'm seeing odd characters, such as 
> omegas, infinity signs, as in an omega cup of chopped parsley.

This comes mainly from copying and pasting recipes from a program
such as Microsoft Word directly into an email message. If you can
use Word to write a text version of the item first and then copy
and past from that, I think that solves the problem.

Even better, although I don't think this option is available in
all versions of Word (I haven't found it in Word 6 for instance)
is to turn off the option that automatically turns "1/2" into
a single character. In Microsoft usual idea that they know better
than you what you want, this option comes up on.

This character translation may also occur in  such programs as
Microsoft Outlook, but I try to avoid using Microsoft products
so I've not checked this program.
 
> I realize that some people have character sets that include 
> fractions. Heck, so do i. But if other folks are reading mail with a 
> different character set they get to see things like omegas and 
> infinity signs instead of fractions.

Not only different character sets. I believe the digestifier program
that creates the SCA-Cooks digest has problems with these special
characters also. So even if you have the fancy character set, you
may still only get garbage if reading the digest. It also doesn't
handle HTML or RTF code well, either.

> Folks, please use three key strokes instead of one and type fractions 
> all the way out, such as 1/2 instead of a single key stroke that i'm 
> seeing as an omega or an infinity sign or some other 
> non-alpha-numeric character.

Again, unless you change the setting, some programs will automatically
change your three character fraction into a single, special character
even if you took pains to type the three letter version.

After a while you can come to recognise which funny character corresponds
to which fraction and change them. I just hope that I get the changes
correct when I have to do this for recipes going into the Florilegium.

- -- 
THLord  Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas         stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****