Weird Character Mapping on Evolution on F11 Preview

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Sun, 2009-05-17 at 15:56 +0100, M A Young wrote:
> On Sun, 17 May 2009, Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> 
> > Instead of showing the character (usually commas, apostrophes, and
> > single / double quotes), it shows a small square box with what appears
> > to be a hex code inside of it. I'm assuming that this is Evolution's way
> > of saying, "I give up - since I don't know how to display this
> > character, I'm going to display the hex code for this character
> > instead."
> 
> I don't think it is just evolution, as that is the standard way to display 
> unicode characters if there isn't a matching character in the selected 
> font. It may be that that email is using a different character set and not 
> declaring it properly, or it may that there are fonts packages you can add 
> so that those characters display correctly.

Indeed! Here's a sample of the HTML source code from an e-mail message I
got today on this. Note that the characters which don't show up are all
the ones that are supposedly encoded to display specific HTML
characters:

        ...but Bishop Fulton Sheen summed it up most succinctly. He was
        reviewing a contract for a television deal when he said with a
        sigh, “The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh
        away.”
        <p>
        It’s understandable when people unfamiliar with the Bible
        balk at the simple offer of salvation in verses like John
        3:16—they want to know,where’s the fine print? While
        the Bible does have more to say about salvation than simply,
        “believe and be saved,” the terms of salvation
        outlined in the Bible don’t constitute a complex web of
        misleading promises.

In each case in the above, everything with a format of &#<some number>;
is supposed to be a specific HTML character - usually a quote,
apostrophe, or something similar. Instead of displaying the appropriate
character, we get a "I give up - I don't know how to display this
character!" message.

In reviewing the source HTML markup, the css definitions (extract below)
call for all of the standard fonts you would normally see and wants to
load ISO8859-1 as the character set. There's nothing out of the ordinary
here at all.

This is definitely happening in ore places than Evolution as well - I
just noticed it there first.

Cheers,

Chris

CSS extract from e-mail message:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>Today In The Word – Moody Bible Institute</title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
.style1 {
        font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
        font-size: 14px;
}
.style2 {
        font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        font-size: 14px;
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #003366;
}
.style3 {font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px;
font-style: italic; }
.style4 {
        font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        font-weight: bold;
        font-size: 16px;
}
.style5 {
        font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
        font-size: 16px;
        font-style: italic;
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #003366;
}
.style6 {
        font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        font-size: 12px;


-- 
======================
"Only two things are infinite,
the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former."

-- Albert Einstein