On Wed, 24 Feb 2021 at 10:18, Michael Hennebry <hennebry@web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu> wrote:
[...]
In other people's posts, I've occasionally seen what I think was
supposed to be whitespace as question marks in black diamonds..
This time my own blanks came back to me that way.
They stay that way in alpines default editor.
Using its vim editor, I see blue vertical strokes followed by blanks.
Any idea what is happening?

I suspect it might have something to do with me using alpine through ssh.
That said, I thought blanks were immune to that sort of thing.

If the original text was Unicode, there are many new possible types of 
"blanks": n-space, m-space, non-breaking space, etc.  Conversions to
other encodings often have problems.   This can be particularly 
annoying in PDF handouts were cutting and pasting a block of
code into an editor looks "correct" but won't compile/execute. 
It is one more reason to avoid spaces in file and directory names
that may be shared with others.

--
George N. White III