Why does the ligature character I used on the computer at work (by copying and pasting from Helen's post) look like an Arabic letter at home?

Probably because you are using different codepages and character sets on the two machines. Most PCs use a Single Byte Character Set which means that at any one time, it can display up to 256 characters (or less because some are reserved for control. Each application has to tell the Operating system (Win98 or whatever) the character Set context, so the OS can use the correct transforms when building the displayed characters. When you cut and paste, the context is often lost. Sometimes that doesn't matter, othertimes it does.

We can take it offline if you want a really technical discussion about SBCS, DBCS, MBCS, Unicode, and the like

Rod