Curious characters in Thunderbird on Linux...

[Björn Persson]

Tim wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 20:54 -0500, Kevin Martin wrote:
> > So if messages are sent using an encoding that you are not this will
> > happen?  Crud, how do you get around /that/?
>
> Your client should automatically display the text correctly, transcoding
> if it has to.  Of course, that will only work if:
>
> 1. The message correctly identifies which encoding it used.
> 2. It's an encoding that your client understands.
> 3. You have fonts that can provide the characters needed.
> 4. You haven't forced your client to use a particular encoding.
> 5. The message hasn't been mangled in transit.

Thunderbird is good with character encodings in my experience, so points 1 and 
2 shouldn't be a problem on your end, Kevin. Point 3 should give different 
symptoms. I don't know if point 4 is possible in Thunderbird. You may want to 
check that, but otherwise the problem is probably not with Thunderbird. Then 
it's either the other person's email program, or a broken gateway (point 5).

> If you think all of that is a right headache, it is.  That's why there
> was a push for unicode all those years back.  One scheme for everyone,
> and no transcoding required.

Unicode was invented some 50 years too late. A gazillion different encodings 
were created in the meantime, and now we have to cope with the mess.

Björn Persson