373590 - character encoding pref. menu should not be display | fonts

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Jungshik Shin]

While answering my brother's question about TB, I really had a hard time locating 'character encoding' preference menu. It's currently in Display | Fonts. I have 2 alternatives:

1. Make a new tab under display named 'Encodings' (along with Formatting, Labels and Fonts) and move what's currently under 'Character encodings' heading to the new tab.
  
2. Split 'character encodings' setting to one for outgoing and the other for incoming. Put incoming setting under 'Character encoding' tab (as suggested above). Move outgoing mail setting somewhere in 'Composition'

Commeon to both proposals: make the real 'font setting menu' directly accessible under 'Fonts' instead of forcing users to click 'Fonts' button to access it.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

These were reorg'd at bug 361434; see in particular cmts 6, 8.

The groupbox around the Fonts button does say "Fonts and Encodings," fwiw.

For the composition encoding, I'd like to see this either somewhere under Composition, or even as a per-identity setting -- bug 119813.

For the display encoding, bug 253575 suggests some additional options related to this; I wouldn't mind seeing fonts & encodings put back on a tab rather than a button, especially if it could mean incorporating those suggestions.

Comment 2

[Martin]

Isn't that a legacy feature from the Netscape days?

Wouldn't it be possible to pull this information from $LANG on Linux at least?

In my /etc/sysconfig/i18n do I have:
        LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"
        SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

Or "locale" gives:
~$ locale
LANG=en_GB.utf8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.utf8"
LC_ALL=
~$

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

> (In reply to comment #2) Isn't that a legacy feature from the Netscape days?

It has been there for a while, but in a more neutral Character Encoding tab. The problem discussed here occurred when these settings were moved into the Display pane in Thunderbird, while retaining the combined incoming/outgoing definitions (the latter not fitting into the Display context). It should be either split or moved back into its own tab, e.g., in the Advanced settings.

[xref bug 448716]

> Wouldn't it be possible to pull this information from $LANG on Linux at least?

Interesting idea. Similar mechanisms should also exist for Windows and Mac OSX, thus allowing to specify a locale from which a default character set can be derived. Nevertheless, locales may allow various encodings (including UTF-8, which should be available for all locales), thus the default settings are still needed. The default for the different locales is probably taken from the l10n information right now, I'd assume.

Comment 5

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

I requested :bwinton about his opinion on what could be done about those two list-items. He answered on bug 537565 comment 3.