The ‘no “dollar”’ comment was addressed, obviously, to the general public, since sunbear patently understands it.
The problem is that different fonts assign different characters to the upper ascii values (128-255). 155 is a cents sign in the “terminal” font that’s the closest thing to a universal standard. But a lot of fonts assign something else to 155 or just don’t use it. So if I do an alt-155, I see a cents sign, but I can’t know for sure that others will.
As someone who used to spend lots of time reading ascii/ansi bulletin boards, I had presumed that the high-bit character set was standardized. Then Windoz decided to make Arial their default font.
And why do PCs and Macs differ in their upper-ASCII usage? Mac fonts are pretty standard except for symbol, dingbat, or specialized fonts, but they don’t match to PC fonts. It isn’t a problem here or in decently good email programs (I type option-4 and get ¢ and email it to a PC user or post it like I just did 
and the PC user sees the cent sign okay), but if I save it as a plain text file and copy it to a floppy and a PC user opens it, many of the upper-ASCII symbols are remapped. (Same with vice versa). Here is what a Mac user sees when opening a document with upper ASCII characters formatted on a PC:
infinity sign _
ìcurly quotesî
em dashó
en dashñ
degrees *
dot ï
european bracket quotes ´in hereª
ellipsis Ö
Was there no standard for upper ASCII when the respective platforms developed?
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