The problem was that apostrophes were appearing as high-ascii characters like acute-accented letter-i's.

The current implementation of knotes uses default settings for Zope's XML-RPC engine and underlying XML parsing, which coughed on these characters.

We might be able to change the settings at the server, though I expect they already accept any valid unicode characters.

So, as a temporary stopgap, I explored ecto's settings... it is indeed possible to preprocess the nasties, encoding them as html entities. See this screenshot:

The results will not always be as expected for these weird characters. By the way, where do they all come from, all these special quote and apostrophe characters generated especially by MSWord? Just when I think I've seen them all, another pops up. :O)