What the heck does ?€œ mean? Why do we see these, and what be done about them? Akkana Peck explores the mysteries of character sets and encodings.

GNU Recode supports over 150 character sets, and converts just about anything to anything. For example, there are still users of legacy Linux systems that still run ISO-8859-1. Recode will convert these to nice modern UTF-8

Use character matches to help select data out of files. Character classes help you select based on as series of letters or text strings.

In Part 1 Akkana Peck talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you see funny characters. But can you fix it when it goes wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?

Some time ago I was required to adapt a bespoke website application (which I had originally written) so it not only supported multiple languages but also multiple character sets. The website, MakingContact.org, is a on-line community for families with disabled children run by the charity Contact a Family.

If you don't include master pages (which are really styles under another name), then Scribus supports three types of hierarchial styles: lines, character, and paragraph. As in any other self-respecting word processor or layout application, these styles allow you to apply detailed sets of formatting options quickly, without having to change each instance of a formatting option individually.

Two somewhat interesting but unrelated topics. The antibiotics must be kicking in ;)

I play with open-source OCR (Optical Character Recognition) packages periodically. My last foray was a few years ago when I bought a tablet PC and wanted to scan in some of my course books so I could carry just one thing to school. I tried every package I could find, and none of them worked well enough even to consider using.

Recent versions of Linux use a unique identifier for hard drives in order to make sure they get mounted to the same location all the time. If you've looked into your /etc/fstab file for auto mounting drives, then you're probably already familiar with the long character strings that are used for UUID's.