Hi Dirk, It looks like that may be the case. Donald Saltarelli suggested my friend run "locale", and it turns out that Redhat 8.0 installed him with unicode's "UTF-8" instead of "en_US". -- Garr At 12:52 PM 2/5/03 -0800, Dirk Groeneveld wrote: >Junst a hunch, not a solution... >If everything he types was converted to (and interpreted as) unicode, then >he might see spaces between the characters.