Archived copies of our Hawthorne Videoactive Report (HVR) newsletters have been showing up as garbage in Firefox and I've finally fixed it using Tip #1 from an Internet post. This I hope is the last of a series of messy cross-platform issues with the newsletter stemming from encodings are handled on different systems.

The HVR newsletter gets processed on several different systems for different purposes on different systems. We've had numerous issues with quotes showing up as funky symbols or the whole page showing up as funky symbols when some form of the newsletter is viewed on some system. I've dealt with (and dreading dealing with) with what seems to me common problems of character encodings and line breaks on different systems/software throughout my IT (and physics) career.

Why should you care? Well, you shouldn't have to care. I shouldn't have to care either and most of the time I don't. The information technology industry has made great advances in allowing things to just work across different platforms and systems. However, there are still examples where someone has to deal with even basic character encoding interoperability issues. My strategy is therefore to try to set things up so there are as few cross-platform boundaries as possible.