character encoding not working - gives weird results
I am running Thunderbird on Linux 16 and have problems with several incoming messages not figuring out a proper encoding of characters. I get text like this
“I think my irons are good, my drive is straight but unimpressive in length, and my putting’s decent, chipping is OK,†said Obama. “My sand game is terrible.â€
In other words, special character are not displayed as intended but through some weird combination of other characters.
I have tried to shift between "western" and "unicode" in Display-Formatting-Advanced and that makes no difference.
The problem is particularly profound when I receive e-mails written on a non-English keyboard, like a Danish or German computer. But Russian works OK!
Any hints as to how I can solve that? There has to be some settings somewhere that I can adjust...
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You will probably find it is folk using obsolete email programs. Eudora in particular does this. They are programs that were written in the days before unicode and they use ANSI character sets that are no longer valid.
Having said that I see mail from outlook users in the USA coming out with 20years old ANSI character set information in them as well. This could be because Microsoft can not get their head around unicode. Excel will chokes and dies on it as well.
A good starting point is to look into the source of the message (ctrl+U)
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Lines like above specify the character encoding what are you seeing in your problem emails?
I understand what you are hinting at, although I don't think this is the root of the problem. Here is what I found in a recent e-mail that I know is sent from a brandnew Apple machine that most definitely does not use obsolete software:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
K=C3=A6re Mogens, jeg regner med at du har f=C3=A5et Oles mail om din tilme= lding til kommunen om bop=C3=A6l hos os fra d. 29/7.
=C3=A6 should have been the Danish character æ;
=C3=A5 should have been the Danish character å;
=C3=A6 (again) should have been an å.
As far as I know, UTF can represent Danish characters...
But I get the same issue in several American newsletters where apostrophe and quotation marks are similarly replaced with a "crazy" character combination.
And I should add that the problem is ONLY in Thunderbird. I can deliberately got my Danish friend to send the exact same e-mail to an account with mail.com - and it comes through without this distortion, so there is no doubt in my mind that the problem is on MY side - and with Thunderbird.
Another possibility is the font used.
I suggest you check in the character map if the font used has the correct unicode characters to display
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CharacterMap
When I say fonts, TTF fonts can be ANSI or Unicode. Even within Unicode not all fonts are created equal and often non ANSI characters are simply missing or not all the extended glyphs are covered. This thread looks to be discussing that exact issue and talks of something called "Supplementary Multilingual Plane" but the basic should be more than adequate for general language duty.
Issues with fonts have historically been worse in FOSS products because they do not have the same commercial capacity to "just pay" someone to create the tools or fix the issues.
Well, I understand your sentiments, but we are entering an academic discussion here that does nothing to solve my problem, as I cannot control how other people use their fonts.
All I can say is that READING THEM is a problem I exclusively find with Thunderbird, not any other e-mail clients, so I hoped there would be a way to get my Thunderbird set up to perform as well as the others.
But I guess, this is not my lucky time...
Thanks for your input, though.