Garbled text (Outlook 2007 SP1)

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Not sure whether to post this in the Outlook or Lounge Matters forum… so here goes.

On several occasions when I get the daily feed from The Lounge some messages have garbled text. The text is always associated with special characters like apostrophes, single quotes, double quotes, dashes, etc. This is not true for all messages as some with the special characters, are displayed in Outlook without a problem.

The attached snapshot reflects some of the garbled text. I can view the like posting on The Lounge and everything appears without a problem. This is one such posting.

The observation is that the problem only involves e-mail from The Lounge. None of the daily messages I receive from friends and family have this issue.

I was going to ask acerfmayer the OP of post 756,983 if they use the forum’s editor or some other app. However, it can be seen that the subject title of post 756,983 which on The Lounge contains a “dash”, is garbled when displayed in Outlook. I doubt that an external editor was used for that entry.

Puzzling times.

Cheers, Bob

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It’s a matter of the code page used to display HTML. If I view post 756,983 using Western European (Windows), I see it as in the upper part of the picture below. If I choose Unicode (UTF8), I see it as in the lower part.
The dash in the subject is an n-dash, not a “standard” character. Word replaces dashes with n-dashes if that’s set in the AutoFormat As You Type tab of Tools | AutoCorrect Options… (or whatever it’s called in 2007).

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Hi Hans.

By double clicking on message 756,983 in my Outlook PST file, I was able to change the encoding from Western European (Windows) to Unicode (UTF8) and the garbled text assumed the “readable” values I see in The Lounge database.

Outlook 2007 appears to allow one to change the encoding for outgoing messages on a global basis but does not appear to have a facility to change the encoding for all incoming messages. The default for outgoing is set to Western European (Windows). I can live with all those defaults. ( Tools | Options | Mail Format | International Options )

When a message arrives in the future with garbled text, I’ll now know how to unscramble it… thanks to your explanation.

Many thanks!

Cheers, Bob

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