[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Message display settings by character encoding (was Re: foolish problem with installer: can't load firmware)



On 2021-09-20 at 03:21, David Christensen wrote:

> Your message displays strangely on Thunderbird (oversized Courier 
> font?).

In my case, it displays with unusually-small characters and what looks
like a different font, not unusually large ones.

> Please verify that your e-mail client is configured to compose 
> messages in plain text (e.g. ASCII), not HTML.

In this case, it has nothing to do with plain text vs. HTML.

If you look at View -> Character Encoding (at least in my older
Thunderbird, although I have no reason to expect it to have moved in
newer ones), you'll see that the message in question is encoded with the
character set "Chinese, Simplified". (For that matter, so is your reply
- although not Stanislav's later reply, or the OP's reply to that.)

Thunderbird can be - and, by default, is - configured to use different
font settings for messages with different character encodings, on the
principle that the font preferred for e.g. English may not have the
glyphs needed for e.g. Chinese. Those different settings can include
different sizes. (Again in my older Thunderbird, these settings are
under Edit -> Preference -> Display -> Formatting -> Advanced.)

In my own case, my default font configuration is Unicode, with a point
size of 16 - but my Chinese, Simplified configuration has a point size
of 14 (although with the exact same specification for what fonts to
use). So that neatly explains why I see smaller characters in those
messages.

Given the OP's E-mail address, it's not surprising that he(?) may have a
mail client configured for Chinese composition by default, and not have
realized that it may make a difference to how the message appears when
written in English.


The upshot of which is: if you want to minimize experiencing this sort
of mismatch, you should be able to adjust your per-character-set font
settings to be more mutually consistent.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature


Reply to: