Weird Fonts

[Gordon Wrigt]

Hello,

Can somebody explain why my Thunderbird displays text in my emails with
strange symbols in it? It seems whenever I type an email use a special
character followed by a space it inputs a weird symbol?? Below is am
example:

Awesome! Thank you for your guidance and help! Is it alright if I
wait for one of the returns to hit and then send you payment?

Thanks for any feedback,

Gordon Wright

[Dave Royal]

There are other similar reports, eg
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2687645
Are you saving and retrieving a draft message?

There's also at least one bug which may be implicated:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290565
but that seems to involve special 'non-breaking' spaces - not ordinary
ones.
--
(Remove any numerics from my email address.)

[Wolf K.]

The culprit seems to be some kind of clash between TB text encoding and
Windows. You could try playing with:
Tools > Options > Display > Formatting > Advanced > Text encoding

There are three options for Latin text: Unicode, Western, and Windows
Western. I don't which of these causes which issues, but I note that the
display glitches appear in messages from a few sources. (No such
glitches locally).

HTH

--
Wolf K.
https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com
It's called "opinion" because it's not knowledge.

[Dave Royal]

"Wolf K." <wol...@sympatico.ca> Wrote in message:

That was my initial thought: Â normally indicates a unicode
double-byte character interpreted as two characters. That often
happens when you tell TB to use a particular character-encoding
and not the one the message uses.

But the examples - generated by a space after a ! - looks
different. Unless his spacebar generates a special
space.

[David E. Ross]

Are you composing in plain-text or HTML-formatting?

Is this happening in entirely new messages, in forwarded or replied
messages, or both?

Are you creating a special character in the messages or only using
characters that appear on your keyboard? If you are creating special
characters, how are you doing that?

--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Paraphrasing Mark Twain, who was quoting someone else:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and
alternative truths.

[Gordon Wrigt]

On 2/22/2017 4:45 PM, David E. Ross wrote:
> On 2/21/2017 11:46 PM, Gordon Wrigt wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Can somebody explain why my Thunderbird displays text in my emails with
>> strange symbols in it? It seems whenever I type an email use a special
>> character followed by a space it inputs a weird symbol?? Below is am
>> example:
>>

>> Awesome!� Thank you for your guidance and help!� Is it alright if I

>> wait for one of the returns to hit and then send you payment?
>>
>> Thanks for any feedback,
>>
>> Gordon Wright
>>
>
> Are you composing in plain-text or HTML-formatting?
>
> Is this happening in entirely new messages, in forwarded or replied
> messages, or both?
>
> Are you creating a special character in the messages or only using
> characters that appear on your keyboard? If you are creating special
> characters, how are you doing that?
>

I followed a suggestion from an earlier post and checked my account text
encoding settings. Apparently my incoming mail was set to Western
(ISO-8859-1) and my outgoing mail was set to Unicode (UTF-8). I set the
incoming mail to Unicode (UFT-8) and the weird characters disappeared!
Thanks to all that replied!

Gordon Wright

[Dave Royal]

On Sat, 25 Feb 2017 20:06:54 -0700, Gordon Wrigt wrote:

> I followed a suggestion from an earlier post and checked my account text
> encoding settings. Apparently my incoming mail was set to Western
> (ISO-8859-1) and my outgoing mail was set to Unicode (UTF-8). I set the
> incoming mail to Unicode (UFT-8) and the weird characters disappeared!
> Thanks to all that replied!
>
> Gordon Wright

You will see that the setting is for the *default* encoding for incoming
mail - i.e. what T'bird should assume if the encoding is not specified in
the message - which it should be. If you look in the headers (ctrl-u) you
should see something like this:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

If somebody is sending you emails without that line, and the emails are
UTF8 but the default is Western, you may see the  effect in the incoming
text. But not normally in your replies.

In your OP you wrote "whenever I type an email". Are these replies or new
emails?

Underneath the default settings there is another: "When possible, use the
default text encoding in replies." That should not normally be set.

My settings - which I think are the default - are:
Outgoing: Unicode
Incoming: Western
When possible...: No

[Gordon Wrigt]

That's what mine were until I changed it to Unicode for both. Once I
did that the email that brought out the problem the most (from my tax
accountant) was fine. It must have had something to do with the email
she sent me? BTW...I only saw it on emails sent to me. Not on anything
I typed and sent. Do I need to go back to the default like yours or
does it just mean that somebody is sending me an email without the
correct header line?

[Dave Royal]

Gordon Wrigt <gwt...@frontiernet.net> Wrote in message:

That suggests her emails are wrongly encoded. It's fine - no need
to change it back. Unicode is a reasonable default these days -
depending where it the world you are.

It's possible you might see similar effects on somebody else's
unspecified-encoding emails - they might be ascii/western but you
treat them as unicode. But you'll probably now recognise the
problem.

[Wolf K.]

On 2017-02-26 22:31, Gordon Wrigt wrote:
> On 2/26/2017 8:42 AM, Dave Royal wrote:

[...]>

>> My settings - which I think are the default - are:
>> Outgoing: Unicode
>> Incoming: Western
>> When possible...: No
>>
> That's what mine were until I changed it to Unicode for both. Once I
> did that the email that brought out the problem the most (from my tax
> accountant) was fine. It must have had something to do with the email
> she sent me? BTW...I only saw it on emails sent to me. Not on anything
> I typed and sent. Do I need to go back to the default like yours or
> does it just mean that somebody is sending me an email without the
> correct header line?

Yes, I see the glitch on incoming emails (and Usenet posts) here too.
IMO, it's the effect of different standards for text encoding. For plain
text, there's ASCII and ANSI. For typefaces, there's such a mixed-up
mess it's amazing that we don't see more weird fonts. Unicode is an
attempt to prevent weird font displays. Unfortunately, a lot of programs
(and programmers) still use legacy encodings.

As I understand it: An encoding is simply a list of characters. A font's
characters are encoded in sequence using one of the "standards" floating
around out there. Suppose the font omits the character at [XX]. Some
encodings don't have a method of signalling "no character here", so the
next character in the font's list is put into [XX] instead of [XX+1]. If
your client uses a different "standard", it will see a code it doesn't
expect, and the result is a weird font.

Bottom line: as long as there's no Big Bad Enforcer of Standards, we'll
continue to see weird fonts. And worse.

Have a good day,

[Dave Royal]

"Wolf K." <wol...@sympatico.ca> Wrote in message:
>

> Yes, I see the glitch on incoming emails (and Usenet posts) here too.
> IMO, it's the effect of different standards for text encoding. For plain
> text, there's ASCII and ANSI. For typefaces, there's such a mixed-up
> mess it's amazing that we don't see more weird fonts. Unicode is an
> attempt to prevent weird font displays. Unfortunately, a lot of programs
> (and programmers) still use legacy encodings.
>
> As I understand it: An encoding is simply a list of characters. A font's
> characters are encoded in sequence using one of the "standards" floating
> around out there. Suppose the font omits the character at [XX]. Some
> encodings don't have a method of signalling "no character here", so the
> next character in the font's list is put into [XX] instead of [XX+1]. If
> your client uses a different "standard", it will see a code it doesn't
> expect, and the result is a weird font.
>
> Bottom line: as long as there's no Big Bad Enforcer of Standards, we'll
> continue to see weird fonts. And worse.
>
> Have a good day,
>

Confusion over terminology certainly abounds. It's a wonderful
mixture of typesetting and computer terminology. The word 'font'
in particular is overused; and it's nice to see the underused
word 'typeface' in your post, Wolf :)

Font, character, typeface, glyph, character-set,
character-encoding... Does 'charset' in the header mean
character-set or character-encoding? Why does T'bird call it
'text-encoding'?

I bet Joshua knows:
http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/why-
email-is-hard-part-2.html

[Richard Owlett]

On 02/27/2017 08:02 AM, Wolf K. wrote:
> [*MASSIVE* snip]

> Bottom line: as long as there's no Big Bad Enforcer of Standards,
> we'll continue to see weird fonts. And worse.

Maybe no *Big Bad Enforcer*, but there is enforcement.
I think this thread demonstrates one aspect of "market pressure" as
enforcement of standards.

The OP noticed a problem.
His first question could be paraphrased as "Which end of transaction (an
email in this case) is the problem?"
In this case he received answers allowing him to remedy the issue at his
end - leaving the concept of fault up in the air.

I have watched this process happen on some USENET groups where people
were annoyed by extraneous characters in posts by one individual.
The "source" being the problem was prompted to "mend his ways".

The application to commercial sites should be obvious.
There are sites trying to sell me something make any of a number of
moronic design decisions. Most often they silently lose a potential
sale. In other cases the failure is not so silent <snicker>.

If the "standard" itself is the problem, the remedy may be more difficult.

An "owl" hereby "ducks" ;/

[Gordon Wrigt]

Thanks for all of the knowledge sharing! That's why come to these
groups with my issues!! I always learn something new... knowledge
shared is always a good thing and maybe someday I can pay it forward!

Thanks again!

Gordon