Display Microsoft Word’s Special Characters through Apache

Recently, I carried out a Linux server upgrade for a client where I did a clean install of the latest operating system/distribution. Since it was a clean install I had to backup and note down the earlier configuration (of mail server, web server, database) and redo those changes. Mostly I preferred not to simply overwrite with the backed up configuration files. I rather documented and edited the configuration manually.

It all seemed to have gone smoothly and the new server has been up and running. But one not-so-fine day, the client started complaining that some HTML pages are not displaying properly. These were showing question marks (?) and some other weird characters. I figured out that these HTML pages were generated using Microsoft Word and had those special characters (closing quotes, double hyphens etc.). I discussed with the client that this could be a web browser problem because it is not able to use the correct character set. Read the rest of this entry »