dread high-bit disease = D = DRECNET
Dread Questionmark Disease
n. The result of saving HTML from Microsoft Word or some other program that uses the nonstandard Microsoft variant of Latin-1; the symptom is that various of those nonstandard characters in positions 128-160 show up as question marks. The usual culprit is the misnamed `smart quotes' feature in Microsoft Word. For more details (and a program called `demoroniser' that cleans up the mess) see http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.