MS Office hyperlinks change code page?

Question

When you paste the following URL into IE: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx , the link to the right of the page reads: "Download Zoomit (77 KB)." If you insert a link into an Office document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint — verified with Office 2003) and activate the link from the document, the same text picked up a pair of A-circumflex characters. This is because the source HTML contains "& nbsp;" objects (inextricable space) that go into Unicode 00A0. In UTF-8, this is expressed as X'C2A0 ', and then X'C2' is displayed as A-circumflex. I don’t quite understand how code pages mix like this, but I would really like to find the meta http-equiv charset value for HTML, which will cause my pages containing an nbsp entity to display correctly even if they are linked with office document.

Answer 1

I found an answer that seems to work. First I added a warning to display document.charset. This was displayed as "utf-8" when called directly, and "windows-1252" when called from a hyperlink in an MS Office document. Therefore, I inserted the following meta tag, and the pages look correct even when called from Office documents:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />