Oh MY GOSH!!!
I just was at a website on a non TG subject, the name of which is "Not To Be Spoken". :), where one of my favorite authors has revealed HIS identity.
He is quite a handsome chap, and I would love to be chained at the foot of his bed, or in the barn, provided it is not too rank in there. I would not actually be pleased to sleep with the sheep, and I must admit that the mere threat of having to sleep with the pigs would force me to willingly promise all sorts of obedience and solicitous conduct and further obeisance.
He has revealed not only his pseudonym, but his real name. Please do be careful dear fellow. Or perhaps like me, he simply does not give a rats ass. :)
Gwen
Comments
009D
So, I am editing a story that was published back in 2007, and at several places have encountered a little square with 009D in it. What is this?
G
Unicode?
I think that what you are seeing is a Unicode character. Your story may well have been written on a system that use a non UTF/UNICODE character set.
For non IT People this is a bit hard to understand so I'll try to keep it simple.
Most US Systems a few decades ago used a thing called ASCII (American Standard for Computer Information Interchange). That was all fine and good if all your used was the '$' sign for currency. But the world is a big place and other curriencies and characters are used.
A friend of mine worked on the development of the DEC Multinational Character Set. This was the forerunner is things like ISO-LATIN variations. These coped with ulauts, cedillias and all manner of local language variants.
This was all well and good but things like Japanese, Chinese, Urdu, Thai etc were excluded.
To solve this UTF was invented. This that several variants UTF-8 (8 bits), UTF-16, UTF-32. These cover all languages used on this planet.
UNICODE is a common variant that usually equates to UTF-16. This is TWO bytes per character.
In hexadecimal representation English Language text starts with a '00' which is the first byte. the nthe second byte is the actual character. A space character is '20' so a space un Unicode would be '0020'.
So back to what you are seeing.
'009D' is a classed as an 'Operating System Command' and can be ignored.
As a general point, until windows 7 Microsoft has been very bad at supporting UTF. Notepad would not let you save a file in anything but the character set(locale) that the system was installed with.
I could rattle on about this stuff for hours. I handle this sort of thing on a daily basis with my customers that range from Japan to Brazil to Russia to the Middle East.