On 9/20/21 4:16 AM, The Wanderer wrote:
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".
My Thunderbird 78.13.0 (64-bit) -> View -> Character Encoding initially
displayed nothing. I can change the Character Encoding and the message
font and/or size changes. If I select a different message and then come
back to the original message, the oversize Courier is there again and
the Character Encoding is whatever I last set. Goofy.
View -> Message Source:
<snip>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="=-sinamail_alt_4cb0d222e6a1010379ef9ce8d2033c03"
<snip>
--=-sinamail_alt_4cb0d222e6a1010379ef9ce8d2033c03
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=GBK
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: inline
<snip>
--=-sinamail_alt_4cb0d222e6a1010379ef9ce8d2033c03
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=GBK
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: inline
<snip>
--=-sinamail_alt_4cb0d222e6a1010379ef9ce8d2033c03--
STFW "GBK" explains your "Simplified Chinese" observation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBK_(character_encoding)
(For that matter, so is your reply
Agreed; and not what I wanted:
View -> Message Source:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=gbk; format=flowed
- although not Stanislav's later reply, or the OP's reply to that.)
View -> Message Source:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
It looks like he did Reply List -> Options -> Text Encoding -> Unicode
to reset the encoding to UTF-8 (?). I will need to remember that trick.
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.)
Edit -> Preferences -> Language & Appearance -> Advanced -> Fonts for ->
Simplified Chinese:
Monospace -> Default (DejaVu Sans Mono)
Size -> 16
That explains what I am seeing.
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.
I will leave the settings at default -- to provide me with a clue when I
am looking at a message that is not plaintext UTF-8.
Thanks for the explanation. :-)
David
