html msgs with Windings font displaying as ordinary text on MacOS ?
Nelson B
My Mac has the Wingdings fonts (1, 2 & 3, don't all Macs? :)
A correspondent of mine frequently sends me html email messages that contain
"spans" of characters in Wingdings fonts. Here's a typical snippet:
<p class=3DMsoNormal><span style=3D'color:#1F497D'>Too good to be =
true</span><span
style=3D'font-family:Wingdings;color:#1F497D'>J</span>
This appears in my TB window as:
Too good to be trueJ.
I've looked for preferences I might have set that would be interfering.
I've made sure that,
- in the advanced Display preferences, "Allow messages to use other fonts"
is checked
- In the View menu, I have "View Message Body as" -> "Original HTML"
- In the "Fonts for Western, I have
Proportional: Sans Serif
Serif: Times
Sans-serif: Arial
Monospace: Monaco
- I have not forced all messages in the folder to use a different character
set than the one with which they were encoded.
Is there something else I could have gotten wrong?
Or is this a bug?
Or ?
Terry R.
> I use TB 3.1.6 on Mac OS 10.5.8.
> My Mac has the Wingdings fonts (1, 2& 3, don't all Macs? :)
Hi Nelson,
This is discussed fairly often here. Search for "html smiley seen as J"
on 10-14-2010 for the last discussion.
I say it's a failure on TB's part, but others blame it on Outlook. You
decide.
Terry R.
--
Anti-spam measures are included in my email address.
Delete NOSPAM from the email address after clicking Reply.
David E. Ross
The problem is that HTML is not designed to display a character
represented on a keyboard by some other character. Thus, a character
entered into HTML using the J on a keyboard should indeed display in
HTML as J. This is not a problem with Thunderbird.
This might be a problem with the E-mail application used to send you the
messages. Micro$oft is notorious for ignoring standards and
specifications. Thus, Outlook might show a smiley face when composing
the message and even when receiving the message. That would be an
Outlook problem: ignoring the HTML 4.01 specification.
Note that the HTML used in the E-mail message sent to you will also not
display Wingdings if it were instead used in a Web page viewed by a
browser. I would guess that the HTML in the message from the <x-html>
tag to the </x-html> tag -- excluding those two tags -- would not pass
validation by the W3C validator (W3C being the organization that
publishes HTML and related specifications). In a sampling of 20
HTML-formatted messages early this year, I found an average of 4.6 HTML
syntax errors per KB of message-body size. My analysis is detailed at
<http://www.rossde.com/internet/ASCIIvsHTML.html>.
--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>
On occasion, I might filter and ignore all newsgroup messages
posted through GoogleGroups via Google's G2/1.0 user agent
because of spam from that source.
David E. Ross
You might also want to read <http://webtips.dan.info/char.html>, which
explains why your problem is caused by the misuse of HTML in an attempt
to display non-standard characters.
Greywolf
> I use TB 3.1.6 on Mac OS 10.5.8.
Wingdings are Windows characters. The wingding font has icons instead of
letters, is all. The smiley is at the same place in the list as J. If
you write text using wingdings, you can train yourself to read it.
TB uses Unicode for text encoding. Unicode is an international standard
for character encoding, which takes into account the variety of
characters and non-Latin alphabets used to write the languages of the
world. A plain text : - ) will be converted to a smiley icon, like this
:-). Outlook does not use Unicode.
BTW, I've noticed that sometimes smileys in messages from Outlook users
are not converted to an icon, so it works both ways.
wolf k.
Mike Easter
> A plain text : - ) will be converted to a smiley icon, like this
> :-).
Not on my Tbird.
Display emoticons as graphics is unchecked on my 2.0.0.24 linux and I
just leaned over and unchecked it on the 3.1.6 Windows.
--
Mike Easter
Greywolf
Oh well, if you don't _want_ this feature...
at least you can turn it off/on.
;-)
wolf k
Nelson Bolyard
> Wingdings are Windows characters.
Wingdings first appeared on the original Macintosh, IINM. That's one of
the reasons why it's so ironic that it's not being displayed now on a Mac!
IIRC, it is a TrueType font.
Nelson Bolyard
> Hi Nelson,
>
> This is discussed fairly often here. Search for "html smiley seen as J"
> on 10-14-2010 for the last discussion.
>
> I say it's a failure on TB's part, but others blame it on Outlook. You
> decide.
Thanks, Terry. I'll have a look.
--
/Nelson Bolyard
Nelson Bolyard
I looked. That thread was enlightening. I must agree with the analysis
shown in
news://news.mozilla.org:119/3pOdnTbGh_BXa0HR...@mozilla.org
--
/Nelson Bolyard <b> </b>
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
00000000011111111112222222222333333333344444444445555555555666666666677777777778
Greywolf
Interesting tidbit. Shows once again that "90% of what we know ain't
so." ;-)
Can the Mac not use Truetype fonts?
wolf k.
Mike Easter
> I looked. That thread was enlightening. I must agree with the analysis
> shown in
> news://news.mozilla.org:119/3pOdnTbGh_BXa0HR...@mozilla.org
Outlook Express can fetch that message from the news server if you leave
out the :119 as
news://news.mozilla.org/3pOdnTbGh_BXa0HR...@mozilla.org
or if one configures the moz server as the OE default then OE can get it
as news:3pOdnTbGh_BXa0HR...@mozilla.org
And Internet Explorer can fetch it with either of those links in the
addressline by employing OE to display it.
Sadly, Tbird cannot do that, nor are there any current operational
extensions that I've found that will do it.
My Tbird also does not display the Unicode characters in the Ralph Fox
message, but instead my Tbird display looks like the googlegroups
display of the Fox message here http://bit.ly/cAvPBP
And incidentally regarding another thread about dupes, I currently have
a massive manifestation of dupes in my Win 3.1.6 for this group. Scores
of them which also leaves out legitimate non-dupes.
I achieved it by using the Repair folder function and calling for 4000
messages and then flipping the sort into unthreaded. Currently I'm
experimenting with what I have to do to make the dupes disappear and
reappear consistently.
I use 2.0.0.24 most of the time and I've never seen the dupe
manifestation before that everyone has talked about seeing with Tb3.
--
Mike Easter
Ron K.
Sure they can. Apple invented the True Type font machanics and the
rasterizer for them. While it was a joint effort with Microsoft, the heavy
lifting was Apples. Because of differences in display ratios Mac vs.
Windows, early TTF were released in two flavors, Mac and Windows, which
were not interchangeable. With OSX, Apple has the Mac using the same TTF
files as Windows.
--
Ron K.
Who is General Failure, and why is he searching my HDD?
Kernel Restore reported Major Error used BSOD to msg the enemy!
Ralph Fox
news://news.mozilla.org/ILGdnbTmuctoTnrR...@mozilla.org
Mike Easter wrote:
> My Tbird also does not display the Unicode characters in the Ralph Fox
> message, but instead my Tbird display looks like the googlegroups
> display of the Fox message here http://bit.ly/cAvPBP
What Google Groups displays to me depends on which browser I use.
Firefox -- GG displays the Unicode 1st row of Wingdings.
IE -- GG displays the ANSI 2nd row of Wingdings.
Opera -- GG displays the Unicode 1st row of Wingdings.
Safari, Chrome (Webkit) -- GG displays both rows of Wingdings.
This strongly suggests to me that the handling of Wingdings depends on
the browser's HTML rendering engine, and that it does not depend on
Google Groups itself.
Some screenshots
================
Google Groups display in FF -- http://i51.tinypic.com/1194itv.png
Google Groups display in IE -- http://i56.tinypic.com/ir2x6u.png
--
Kind regards
Ralph
Nelson Bolyard
> On 20/11/2010 07:36, Nelson Bolyard wrote:
>> On 2010-11-19 05:30 PDT, Greywolf wrote:
>>
>>> Wingdings are Windows characters.
>> Wingdings first appeared on the original Macintosh, IINM. That's one of
>> the reasons why it's so ironic that it's not being displayed now on a Mac!
>>
>> IIRC, it is a TrueType font.
>
> Interesting tidbit. Shows once again that "90% of what we know ain't
> so." ;-)
You're SO RIGHT. I was very mistaken. Wingdings IS from Microsoft.
It is also a TrueType font. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings
If I'm not mistaken (again), Mac's were the first desktop computer to use
TrueType fonts on screen. The Wingdings font was a response to some font
commonly found on the Macs at the time that Windows 3 came out (~1990?).
Sorry.
--
/Nelson Bolyard