tile grout question

Colon dash close brackets or colon dask open brackets.

:-)

Sounds liek a disae a carpnetr has got.

Ooh, me colon! Must dash - close them brackets for me, mate ;-)

no I meant the proper picture ones like you have.

dedics

Try it!

When I type colon hyphen close bracket - I "see" (on my screen) just those characters.

When I later view my own post in the newsgroup, I see a nice little yellow smiley. This is because Thunderbird notices the colon hyphen close bracket and chooses to display a smiley instead! :-)

Not all news readers work the same but you do appear to be using Thunderbird as I do.

Oh ok, here goes :-)

dedics

Rod wrote:

Me too.

All I see is a box with a red cross in it (if I view in html) or just the charachters if I view in plain txt. I'm using OE6 - is that why I only see the box & cross?

I'd be surprised if OE does that on its own. I get the same because I installed OE-quotefix years ago (Microsoft being congenitally incapable of making a news/email client that can handle quoting properly). As well as fixing (mostly) Microsoft's quoting screw-ups, that application also added graphical rendering of smilies etc. Or it did, until Microsoft beefed up OE security to not download "external" images by default. That had the side-effect of losing the smilies (even though they aren't coming from the Interweb). My guess is that you also have some 3rd party app (perhaps even the same one) that is caught out by this setting. You could switch it back on in tools/options/security but I don't recommend that you do that permanently!

I really ought to use proper software, but somehow I just can't be arsed to switch!