My guess is the funny characters are from the special asymmetrical quote characters. These won't work in
Java, or display properly in Unix tools like pico. You can get these characters by typing option-[ and option-shift-[. A lot of
word processing programs can automatically replace pairs of quote characters with the aymmetrical ones. This is often called "smart quotes". My old copy of bbedit lite, for example, has an option for this under preferences->editor defaults->smart quotes.
Tab sizes can vary not just from system to system, but from program to program on the same system. I know you can set the tab size in bbedit. You probably can in pico as well. Alternatively, many more programming-oriented text editors have an option whereby when you type the tab key it will insert some some number of spaces rather than a tab character.