124510 - Unable to display headers on envelope with the fonts specified for the language

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[ji]

Per Naoki's request, this bug is seperated from bug 121520 and filed only for
mail header display problem on envelope.

The problem is that mail headers are always displayed with system language fonts
no matter if the language of the mail is different or not.
For example, on a Simplified Chinese system, a Japanese mail header on envelope
is displayed with the Chinese fonts instead of using the fonts that the user
specified for Japanese.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This isn't still a problem?

Comment 2

[ISHIKAWA, Chiaki]

Attachment: TB now shows Chinese characters using Chines font on Japanese Window system

I think the problem has been solved by the introduction of UTF-8 more or less.

Please see the attached image.

I am using a windows 10 system and its main locale is Japanese.
I have received messages from Chinese contacts.
The image shows some headers from the Chinese contacts.
Although English is used as the common language to communicate, sometimes mail clients insert some strings automatically in one's language and in this case, the strings were written in Chinese.

The underlined phrase, 回复, seems to mean "Return" or something like that in Chinese., maybe for "Re:", I am not sure.

The first Chinese letter, 回, is commonly used in Japan, too.
However, the second letter, 复, is a simplified Chinese used in main land China and is not used in Japan at all and Japanese font set does not have it.

So I can say that the problem has been solved in the intervening 23 years since the original bugzilla was entered!
(And the solution to this issue is more like the ubiquitous use of UTF-8 for international communication. To be honest, if the mailer used by my Chinese partner still tried to use GB-something Chinese character set for communication, I have no idea what happens today.)

Generally speaking, for ordinary uses who are interested in the current usage, the problem no longer happens I suspect. If mails composed in two languages that require 16-bit character code systems
can be shown without a big deal, I think the case is solved now.
OTOH, someone who has tons of old e-mails encoded in old ISO-2022-JP and seven bit encoding and
also have some Chinese messages with GB-something encoding of that era may have some issues, but that is not something the current TB needs to cope with it any more. Old e-mails can be fed through clever converter to obtain UTF-8 encoding hopefully.

Come to think of it, in the main body text, I often see the date expressed in the sender's language, German, French, Chinese, etc.
They are automatically inserted by the mail client when a response is composed and the original message is quoted. The date in respected languages are shown as they should be (using the available font sets of the particular language. If the font sets are not available, tough.).
We have come a long way although there may be some corner cases which might require improving, but I cannot think of such cases off my head right now. We are rather in good shape now.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks chiaki.

WFM per comment 2