Monday, 6 January 2014

How to stop Outlook on Mac OSX replacing quotes & apostrophes with superscript numbers

Since switching to a Mac, I have been experiencing an odd issue with Outlook: although in my message editor all would look well, recipients of my messages would often find the apostrophes (’) replaced with a 1 and “” quotes with 3 & 2.

Today, I had had enough and tried to find the reason/solution. The former, it seems, is because Macs have their own version of ISO-8859 encoding, which means that other platforms do not correctly interpret text encoded in this format. The solution is simply force Outlook to use a different "Preferred encoding" in the Composing Preferences - UTF-8 works for me.

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15 comments:

  1. epsteinsternator12 February 2014 at 23:25

    Thank you! This has been driving me crazy.

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  2. Unknown12 March 2014 at 00:26

    Thanks!

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  3. Jörgen Nilsson3 April 2014 at 17:12

    Thank you! Sometimes I cannot see the forest for all the trees, and I have apparently missed that checkbox

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  4. GP15 May 2014 at 20:58

    Thank you! I've been using Outlook 2011 on 2 different MBPs but just started seeing this in the past few months. It was driving me crazy also.

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  5. pblanton10 June 2014 at 23:44

    YAY!!! I appreciate this post. My emails have been making me look like a fool!

    ReplyDelete
  6. aileverte :: Ela Kotkowska29 June 2014 at 05:10

    Thank you - I've been googling this problem from time to time since I purchased my Mac computer, and finally found the answer! Now, if I only could make Apple type foreign characters in the same font as the rest of the message... :-)

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  7. Unknown19 April 2015 at 08:25

    Thank you soooo much!! This has been driving me nuts - but all better now. Thanks again :))

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  8. baruch7 August 2015 at 04:18

    outlook --> preferences --> email --> composing --> at bottom UTF-8: still experiencing "around words" showing as superscript numbers - any other thought???

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    Replies
    1. Richard Edwards7 August 2015 at 12:06

      Sorry, not sure why it's not working for you. Perhaps try a different encoding?

      Delete
  9. RoniSue Lee7 September 2015 at 09:26

    Wow, thank you for posting this tip! I don't know why I never found this help before, and did today, but I'm thankful!

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  10. Unknown3 February 2016 at 01:59

    Richard Edwards: Had the same issue. I changed font from consol to times new roman, now it's not doing superscript anymore under UTF-8

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  11. Unknown11 August 2016 at 03:11

    I've tried everything and this still won't work for me. Using Word and Outlook 2011 (v. 14.6.6). Changed encoding on both programs to UTF-8 (and also tried UTF-7 when that didn't work). Changed font of doc and default outlook font to Times New Roman. Still, I'm getting 2s and 3s as quotes. Help!

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  12. Anonymous15 June 2017 at 22:13

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Stewart17 September 2018 at 03:22

    Just now I've received an email with this glitch in. It has:
    Content-type: text/plain;
    charset="ISO-8859-1"
    But these bogus characters mean that the message is not in fact in ISO-8859-1. So the reason isn't "because Macs have their own version of ISO-8859 encoding" - it's because Outlook is lying about it being in ISO-8859-1.

    ReplyDelete
  14. David Max Brown10 January 2019 at 01:30

    fantastic - I have been going nuts and tried all sorts of other options like downloading other fonts or disabling many of the fonts in my font book but your solution WORKED

    ReplyDelete

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