331506 - Wrong font used in UTF-8 mails

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 91190

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Thomas Boerkel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060124 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060124 Firefox/1.5.0.1

When a plain text message is composed in UTF-8, Thunderbird uses the wrong font.

This was OK in Thunderbird 1.0.x. It happens since 1.5.

It only happens on Thunderbird for Linux, not on Windows.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Look at UTF-8 formatted mail.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
UTF-8 mails are displayed with strange font.

Expected Results:  
UTF-8 mails should be displayed in the same font, as other mails.

Using Suse 9.2, KDE 3.5.1, Thunderbird 1.5.

Attaching source code and screenshot of Mail1 (UTF-8) and Mail2 (not UTF-8).

This may or may not be related to bug #323747 or bug #291521.

Comment 1

[Thomas Boerkel]

Attachment: UTF-8 mail source

Comment 2

[Thomas Boerkel]

Attachment: UTF-8 mail screenshot

Comment 3

[Thomas Boerkel]

Attachment: non UTF-8 mail source

Comment 4

[Thomas Boerkel]

Attachment: non UTF-8 mail screenshot

Comment 5

[Jesse Glick]

Looks like a duplicate of bug #270287.

I have to say I find the resolution of that bug as INVALID to be unsatisfactory.

1. Thunderbird 1.0.x (in Fedora Core 4) did not seem to have this problem, though I think much older versions might have. For whatever reason, on upgrading to Thunderbird 1.5.x (in Fedora Core 5) this problem suddenly (re-?)appeared. The Fedora Core 5 release notes mention that setting MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 can help with font issues, but that does not fix this bug. I only found out about the fix after searching bugzilla.mozilla.org. So somehow the 1.0 -> 1.5 upgrade made Th interpret its own settings differently.

2. The workaround is not very intuitive. I want Thunderbird to use the same fonts as my Gnome desktop specifies; namely, for plain text message, the default monospace font. Why are there separate settings for different "languages" (i.e. encodings)? After all, we are talking about the font that will applied to a message which is in fact purely ASCII - the only difference is what mail header is used (e.g. UTF-8 vs. ISO-8859-1 or -2). It would be another matter if the preferences page were controlling what font is used to display Japanese or Cyrillic characters, but all the messages I ever receive (that are not spam) are in one of the Latin Unicode blocks, and every such character looks fine in the regular system font.

3. #270827 says to set the font preference for "Unicode" but there is no such combo box entry in Th 1.5; it is "Other Languages", which is especially confusing. From the impl standpoint I can decipher that this really means "font to use when mail encoding is set to UTF-8" but from the user standpoint it really looks more like "font to use when message is sent in Tifinagh or something equally exotic". Also there is a entry "User Defined" - I have no idea what this would mean or how it differs from "Other Languages".

Can the UI of this part of Th preferences be revisited to better match the reality of an increasingly UTF-8-friendly world? I would expect one menu item "Default" which would set the font to use unless otherwise specified; by default there would be only this menu item, clearly indicating that that font is always used for all messages. There could be a button Add... which would let you add Unicode script blocks (e.g. "Cyrillic", "Kanji", "Arabic", whatever) to this list, and you could override the font for characters falling into those script blocks only. This would preserve the flexibility needed by people whose system fonts have **** (or missing) glyphs for specific scripts they use, while making things work properly out of the box for people whose systems come with good, comprehensive Unicode fonts. For some operating systems (or rather font rendering subsystems), even this much configurability may be too much; the OS might do a better job of selecting the right glyphs from backup fonts itself.

Comment 6

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

I get UTF-8 mails regularly and I don't seem to see anything amiss with the fonts.

Shredder trunk nightly, 10.5.5 on Mac btw.

Reporter, does this issue still occur with the latest trunk nightlies?