Quark Forums

This seems rather unfortunate, and I would hate to think that this is repeated on all PCs, but whenever I receive a sales promotion email from Quark, it contains rogue characters which are obviously not ASCII, and mess up the text.

Hopefully the sample below will illustrate the problem, but from a top-notch software company it should not be happening: 

You have evolved. Design has evolved. And now — with
QuarkXPress® 8 — page layout has evolved. It’s still the QuarkXPress you know but with new optimised tools, a modern interface, Flash® authoring tools, and unparalleled typographic control.

You’ll wonder how you survived without it!

MacUserâ„¢ thinks so too, giving it an unprecedented

britsmith:

This seems rather unfortunate, and I would hate to think that this is repeated on all PCs, but whenever I receive a sales promotion email from Quark, it contains rogue characters which are obviously not ASCII, and mess up the text.

Hopefully the sample below will illustrate the problem, but from a top-notch software company it should not be happening: 

You have evolved. Design has evolved. And now — with
QuarkXPress® 8 — page layout has evolved. It’s still the QuarkXPress you know but with new optimised tools, a modern interface, Flash® authoring tools, and unparalleled typographic control.

You’ll wonder how you survived without it!

MacUserâ„¢ thinks so too, giving it an unprecedented

 

I know very little about PCs and even less about ASCII, but I've just recevied the same email, and on my Mac it reads ok

 Here's another one, received this morning:

Do you receive InDesign® documents from your customers or clients? Do you spend time re-keying or formatting previously created documents into QuarkXPress®? Do you have print projects completed with InDesign that you’d like to convert into HTML or Flash® and add interactivity without having to learn to code? With the award-winning QuarkXPress 8 and Markzware’s ID2Q™ you can. Purchase or upgrade to QuarkXPress 8 from any of the Quark® Authorised Resellers highlighted in this email and you’ll receive a copy of ID2Q worth £190 absolutely free.

Nobody else sends me emails like this!? 

Hi, I work in the Direct Marketing Team at Quark and want to get to the bottom of this - thanks for pointing it out.

Before we send out any email we send it via several content checkers and run an in-box report and have had issues in the past with special German or French characters for example which was a coding problem but I haven't seen this before in our English langauge versions.

Can you send me more information on your email provider, the browser you used to view the email etc and send the actual email to sharwood@quark.com? I will need to get a few people to look at it and identify what we're doing wrong so we can tweak for our next send.

Many thanks again.

Sarah

 Thanks for looking into this, Sarah.

 I use Outlook Express on my PC, in Windows XP, and because I'm in England the default is Western European encoding.

I will email details of my service provider etc., plus the email itself.

Thanks everyone for getting back to me with the examples of where our coding has gone wrong. We have identified the problem as being around the   HTML code. It's acting strangely in certain instances.

Going forward we will not code using this character. On older templates where we are re-working designs and copy we will try our best to identify these codes and remove them and re-code where necessary. Please do bear with us for the next month or so whilst we re-standardise everything. We have a few different people in our Direct Marketing team based around the globe so I'll need to get everyone inline/onboard over the coming weeks. If you have any issues please do let me know on the Forum or directly (sharwood@quark.com).

Sarah