What font am I missing for forum messages?

[EdH]

I'm running Fedora and using Firefox to access my mail. I was kind of hoping it would fix itself at some point, but alas. . . :

This what I see for forum messages in my inbox:

[retina]

That looks more like an encoding error.

The message might be sent in UTF-8, but the client is decoding ISO-8859-1. Or some combination like that.

Have a look at the charset value. e.g. 'charset="iso-8859-1"' in the header for "Content-Type:". And also check that your client settings aren't forcing an encoding.

[EdH]

Originally Posted by retina

That looks more like an encoding error.

The message might be sent in UTF-8, but the client is decoding ISO-8859-1. Or some combination like that.

Have a look at the charset value. e.g. 'charset="iso-8859-1"' in the header for "Content-Type:". And also check that your client settings aren't forcing an encoding.

Well, I can't seem to get anywhere. I copied the text and tried it in several programs on my main system and a few of my math machines and none will display readable (by me) text. I can't find any machine settings, although my machine claims to be familiar with several hundred encodings. I found ways to convert documents, but nothing that allows me to set up recognition across the computer. I did not try to make a document to convert, since the real goal is to be able to read this directly without copy/paste/convert.

As for, "also check that your client settings aren't forcing an encoding," would this be my Firefox that's doing the encoding, or possibly my web based email provider?

[retina]

Originally Posted by EdH

As for, "also check that your client settings aren't forcing an encoding," would this be my Firefox that's doing the encoding, or possibly my web based email provider?

Copy/paste etc. won't help here. Once it has the wrong encoding and displaying the wrong characters then you lose the information. You need to convert the original source using the correct encoding. Only then you can copy/paste/convert/etc.

It might be that the sender is sending the wrong encoding. Check the email headers to see what is happening. Look at the "Content-Type:" header and compare that to the contents.

[a1call]

Not sure if this will help but I have had similar issues with file names in Korean font which were zipped. The issue was that windows native unzipper is not able to decode the font. Using a more dedicated program such as 7-zip does a much better job. So if there is any compression anywhere try a dedicated compression program rather than the built in OS.

[retina]

Originally Posted by a1call

Not sure if this will help but I have had similar issues with file names in Korean font which were zipped. The issue was that windows native unzipper is not able to decode the font. Using a more dedicated program such as 7-zip does a much better job. So if there is any compression anywhere try a dedicated compression program rather than the built in OS.

Yes, Windows is a bit shit with character encodings in some cases. But calling it a font is confusing and incorrect. Fonts are for the display of characters; that is, the shapes you see on the screen. Encodings are for defining which character to use. So the proper term is "Korean characters", or at a stretch "Korean letters". There is no Korean font.

[EdH]

Originally Posted by retina

Copy/paste etc. won't help here. Once it has the wrong encoding and displaying the wrong characters then you lose the information. You need to convert the original source using the correct encoding. Only then you can copy/paste/convert/etc.

It might be that the sender is sending the wrong encoding. Check the email headers to see what is happening. Look at the "Content-Type:" header and compare that to the contents.

Well, as can be seen in the original image, this board is the sender. These are messages telling my threads of interest have new posts. This is the reason I brought it up here. (Well, that and the knowledgable folks, like yourself.)

[retina]

Originally Posted by EdH

Well, as can be seen in the original image, this board is the sender.

What is that value in the "Content-Type:" header field?

[EdH]

Originally Posted by retina

What is that value in the "Content-Type:" header field?

There is no "Content-Type:" that I can find.

[retina]

Originally Posted by EdH

There is no "Content-Type:" that I can find.

Then your email client will use its default encoding to decode the characters.

What is the default encoding setting?

[EdH]

Originally Posted by retina

Then your email client will use its default encoding to decode the characters.

What is the default encoding setting?

It's web based email. I have no client. I'm using Firefox to access the webmail (Juno).


I just forwarded one of the messages to a Yahoo address and it looks fine with the same Firefox browser. I guess the issue is Juno.