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The multitude of people using the Internet, and the consequent multitude of different computer systems and programs involved in the chain is one of the great things about the Internet. Unfortunately, it also causes lots of annoying problems, for example those when posting and receiving messages. Your messages are transmitted through goodness-knows how many different computer systems before they finally reach any particular recipient. Each system the message passes through may modify it slightly, depending on how it handles characters it does not recognize. The best solution is to use the "lowest common denominator" in composing your messages. MS Word has lots of nifty features that make your documents look great (I use it myself in my work). For example, Word can be set up to replace double quotes " with "smart quotes," typesetter-style quotation marks that curve one way for the opening quotes, and another way for the closing quotes. It looks nice, but can't be interpreted by lots of computers on the Internet. Proportionally-spaced fonts look great, but are dangerous on the Internet too, since many monitors only allow fixed-spaced text characters (VT100's and VT220's to name two). These terminals' display looks like what you get on a PC at a regular DOS prompt, and they don't "do Windows". The best way for you to compose messages that will experience the lease amount of wierdness when they are received is to use a very simple text editor to compose your messages. In Windows, I'd say to use the Notepad application. In DOS, use the Edit application. The don't let you make text bold or use fancy fonts or characters or anything like that. With Word, it might be doing lots of strange things, and you may not even be aware of it. If you're really attached to your word processor, use the option to save your document as text (variously called "text", "ASCII text", "Text with Formatting", or something like that, but usually includes the word "text"). As long as the margins are not too wide (I'd use a line length of 75 characters or less) and the plain text version of your message is formatted as you want it to look, it should survive the transfer to most systems. Hope this can help some of you, and didn't bore those who knew it already! :-) ============================================================== Gary Zimmerman Technical Writer || Internet: [log in to unmask] || _I'm_ an individual too. ==============================================================