Point me in the right direction

["Mark Feller" <mark.j.feller@xxxxxxxxx>]

On a given web page, if I look at the source on the server, I see tags such as <A0>,<93>,<94>, etc., that I guess are extensions, etc. that are added beyond the simple HTML tags that I used to hand-code simple websites many years ago.  ...and that these extensions are the source of a large number of formatting errors with different browers, and are also why web page authoring tools should be more useful now to hide details.  

If I open the page with IE, I see question marks where these tags appear.  If I view the source with IE, I see a double space in the case fo the <A0> tag, and quotation marks in place of the tags such as <93>word<94>.

If I open the page with Firefox, all of these places show up as rectangular box characters.  In the source,  all of these tags are simply replaced with double spaces.

Microsoft Publisher was used for these web pages.  My question here, just to make sure...is there some compatibility module or something that I can use before telling the author to change tools?  Since it effects IE as well as Firefox, I wonder if there is some interpretation the server is supposed to do with these tags before sending them to the browser.

Some background:  I was asked to set up a webserver for a small non-profit organization, where the lady running it already had a website authored with Publisher.  We uploaded the site, and now issues.  Because of the effort she put in already, if this is something I can fix with a server mod, I would prefer to do this before asking her to start again with something other than publisher.

(I have never fully run into browser-compatibility issues.  I know that is likely a mess, which I have avoided on the small website I run separately through hand coding very simple HTML with a bit of _javascript_ and trying to keep things as simple as possible).
 
Any advice is appreciated