289510 - Different character encodings in same message (UTF-8) aren't displayed with the appropriate fonts

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 91190

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Alf]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12
Build Identifier: Thunderbird/version 1.0+ (20050407)

[Assigned to general because it affects several components]
When sending a message with different character encodings (UTF-8) the rules that Thunderbird uses to 
apply the fonts specified in Preferences for each portion of the message are very confusing. The way it 
is displayed in the message composition window and in the message display after receiving is 
different. Moreover, there isn't a Unicode font that can be specified.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Choose Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding.
2. Write a message with four paragraphs: (1) with Japanese characters, (2) with Spanish characters (n~, 
a'...), (3) only with English characters, (4) with a mixture of Japanese and Spanish.
Actual Results:  
In the message composition the Japanese font is applied throughout the whole message except the 
Spanish characters, for which the Western font is used.

In the message view after receiving the message Thunderbird applies the Japanese font to the first 
paragraph, the Western font to the second, the Other Languages to the third and, in the fourth 
paragraph, the Japanese font for the Japanese characters and the Western font for the rest.

Expected Results:  
Apply the Japanese font to the Japanese characters (katakana, hiragana, kanji and those which are 
Japanese-specific) and the Western font to the rest (both Spanish and English).
[See Additional Information for more details]

These considerations apply both to the message composition and message view.

Thunderbird 1.0.2 has a Unicode font preference, but in the nightly build it was renamed to Other 
Languages, which at least is less confusing although it doesn't work as it should (read below). English, 
Spanish, French, German... all belong in the Western category, so in principle I think it doesn't make 
sense to apply the Other Languages font to the 3rd paragraph.

An issue that can be considered is that English characters are also a subset of Japanese fonts. A way to 
solve this problem (but probably an unnecessary complex one) is to apply the fonts according to the 
input method used. In this way Hiragana, Katakana and Full-width Roman would of course use the 
Japanese font, as well as Romaji. If using English, Spanish, etc. as input-method, display the text with 
the Western font (although English and Romaji are the same character set). 

The best way I see to solve this problem, however, is being able to specify a Unicode font, so that when 
Unicode encoding is chosen this font is applied to the *entire* message.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.