Thanks, John. Actually, hex conversion isn't a problem for me, I've been doing it my head for thirty-five years or so. If I'm feeling lazy, I've any number of hex converters available including my Palm VII. I may be the last living person who can actually read a core dump.

My work with fonts tends toward the type one Adobe fonts and Knuth's Computer Modern fonts associated with TeX, LaTeX and Metafont. I use Word (Office XP Pro) for the odd client document but my own preference for nice looking documents is LaTeX. I run teTeX in Cygwin under Win XP Pro and my primary editor is GNU EMACS. I've done Windows MFC development in C and C++ but these days I tend to favor tools that support open development and the ability to target several OSs with a single code base. When PostScript printers were first introduced—but before GUIs came along—I used to hand code PostScript files just to make overhead transparancies that looked nice—a skill that came in handy when I started using a, then new, NeXT Workstation

I'm accustomed to specifying octal and hex values in source files and and in regular expressions using the backslash escaping syntax I just don't do enough hard core HTML or to have retained all the details of ampersand character encoding. I am, though, one of a relatively small number of people who've actually used Tim Berners-Lee's original text-only Web browser.

Now what Mudcat needs is a help page explaining to users of the older technologies how to configure their systems so they can see schwa characters as Joe begins including them in his posts.

      - Mark