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Old 24 Dec 2018, 06:12 PM   #1
xyzzy
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FM changes mail font - I think

I belong to one of the the google groups. I get it's discussions on my gmail account. I've linked my FM account to that gmail account so I can see stuff directly in FM. The latest newsletter had an entry where someone typed "I can’t think of..." (that's copy/pasted directly from the text in gmail). When it reaches my FM webmail the quote in "can’t" is replaced by black diamond with a question mark in the middle.

If that was the convention that FM displays in their webmail I could understand things like that can happen if a character is not in the display set. But if I forward that email from FM to another account or access it with my Thunderbird that black diamond remains which leads me to believe the character has been modified in the email text itself.

Is there any way to get FM to leave the font alone in the actual email body?

FWIW, to illustrate what I am seeing I posted a picture in google photos (part as an experiment since I never used google photos before). Here's the link to the photo -- I hope. If you can see it the one at the top is the original and the one at the bottom is what FM displays it as.
------
Note, it can be inconvenient we can't embed photos in this forum.
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Old 24 Dec 2018, 06:23 PM   #2
Terry
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perhaps change the default text in your account, its in settings
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Old 24 Dec 2018, 06:32 PM   #3
xyzzy
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This is an update to my previous post. Maybe I'm wrong about this and both my Thunderbird, FM webmail, and the other places I tested just have the 7-bit ASCII limitation.

I looked at the raw text on gmail and FM's webmail. Both showed,

Code:
I can=92t think o
I guess =92 is the right curved quote because hex 92 is what I see in the extended ASCII table so I guess FM doesn't change it. It just can't display it.

My Thunderbird's raw text for this however looks like,

Code:
I can=EF=BF=BDt think o
which I am not sure what that is. 3-byte Unicode maybe for the black diamond with a question mark in it?

Last edited by xyzzy : 24 Dec 2018 at 06:38 PM.
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Old 24 Dec 2018, 06:43 PM   #4
xyzzy
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry View Post
perhaps change the default text in your account, its in settings
I don't see any place to do that (other than UI font).
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Old 24 Dec 2018, 06:52 PM   #5
Terry
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I thought by changing that it would help, its in Preferences, sadly not many to chose from
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Old 24 Dec 2018, 07:02 PM   #6
Berenburger
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Quote:
Originally Posted by xyzzy View Post
FWIW, to illustrate what I am seeing I posted a picture in google photos (part as an experiment since I never used google photos before). Here's the link to the photo -- I hope. If you can see it the one at the top is the original and the one at the bottom is what FM displays it as.
Error 404 (Not found).
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Old 24 Dec 2018, 07:44 PM   #7
xyzzy
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Hmm. The link works for me. But maybe because it's my own google account. Oh well, live and learn. Won't use that thing again. Thanks for the feedback.

Wonder what I can use where I can post a link that a non-account holder can use but can only see the one picture without seeing my entire library (album) of pictures. Let's try Photobucket.

https://i627.photobucket.com/albums/...psyu0pgge1.jpg

This time I logged out of the Photobucket account and that picture is still accessible by me. Should have done that in the first place since I've used Photobucket for years as a place to embed pictures in forum posts that actually support that feature.

Got a little off topic here. Sorry.

Last edited by xyzzy : 24 Dec 2018 at 07:53 PM.
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Old 24 Dec 2018, 07:59 PM   #8
xyzzy
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry View Post
I thought by changing that it would help, its in Preferences, sadly not many to chose from
Yeah, change my system font or nothing at all. And it's still not clear that affects an email content. Doesn't matter either, not going to change it.

Maybe this should be a ticket request asking for support of a a wider email character display set (Unicode perhaps). Anyone test Japanese to see if that gets through ok? Those use 3-byte Unicode. Got to try that myself.

...a little later...

Hmm, sent some Japanese characters, 初音ミク, and they got through ok. And it did use 3-byte unicode (=E5=88=9D=E9=9F=B3=E3=83=9F=E3=82=AF). Very confusing. FM can handle that but can't handle a simple right single quote.

Also tried sending "that’s", i.e., with the right single quote. FM doesn't encode it like gmail did (=92). FM encoded the quote as,
Code:
that=E2=80=99s
which I believe is also a 3-byte unicode character.

Last edited by xyzzy : 24 Dec 2018 at 08:18 PM.
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Old 25 Dec 2018, 05:20 AM   #9
BritTim
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What you are seeing is an issue that has existed for a long time. The best term for this I have heard is "the email wasteland of encoding horrors". It happens when either the encoding explicitly specified for email is incorrect, or the mail client misinterprets it. This can occur at many points in the message's history of transfer around the universe.

This particular case, I think, is caused when somewhere translation to UTF8 encoding assumes the wrong non unicode encoding. This is common as variants of ASCII (for non US languages) have long been bolted on to systems that want to support different characters to those in the standard US ASCII character set. I have seen the apostrophe suffer before when this happens.

There are an almost infinite number of transitions that a character string can be subjected to as it passes through different systems. For example, you may have a character string written in English, but written by a German on a system with the system language set to German. The conversion to UTF8 for inter system transfer assumes that the apostrophe, say, is some different character and everything gets messed up.

You are not going to discover a 100% cure for this, but it can sometimes be possible to identify and eliminate the cause in specific cases.
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Old 25 Dec 2018, 11:49 AM   #10
Grhm
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Quote:
Originally Posted by xyzzy View Post
Wonder what I can use where I can post a link that a non-account holder can use but can only see the one picture without seeing my entire library (album) of pictures. Let's try Photobucket.
You can do that with Fastmail:
• Set up a new folder in 'files',
• Upload the picture to it,
• Set up a new alias,
• Set up a web site on the domain of that alias,
• Choose the 'gallery' option,
• Point it to the new folder that has the picture in it.
• Voila!
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Old 25 Dec 2018, 12:39 PM   #11
xyzzy
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I believe my photobucket link I posted in post 7 works., i.e.,

https://i627.photobucket.com/albums/...psyu0pgge1.jpg

Did you try it?
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Old 25 Dec 2018, 04:55 PM   #12
n5bb
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Email is sent via 7-bit ASCII characters due to legacy considerations. Many of the early computers and associated equipment (modems and Teletype printers) could only use 7-bit data. But we often need to transfer 8-bit data, so for purposes of email transmission the following header is usually added, with a tag which is usually one of the ones indicated:

Content-Transfer-Encoding:
  • 7bit (this is the default and is used for plaintext message bodies)
  • base64 (this is how large binary blocks such as images and attached files are usually sent)
  • quoted-printable (this mode is used when only a few 8-bit characters need to be sent, such as extended ASCII or Unicode, and uses an ASCII = equal sign followed by a hexadecimal two-character value)
The content of an email can be formatted in various manners. To indicate which types of content are to be found, the following header with indicated possible tags is added:

Content-Type:
  • text/plain
  • format-flowed
  • text/html
  • charset="UTF-8" (or charset=utf8)
  • application/pdf (or other application type)
  • multipart/alternative; boundary="..." (used for MIME multipart message bodies)
To determine how to interpret the body of the message, you need to look at the Content-Transfer-Encoding and Content-Type headers described above. I have shown some common tags for these headers, but others may also be found. First look immediately before the first blank line in the message (which is where the headers actually start) and look up starting at that point through the headers. If a multipart/alternative header is found, then you will find one or more multipart sections in the message body, and they will often contain both Content-Transfer-Encoding and Content-Type headers.

If characters which cannot be represented in standard 7-bit ASCII need to be sent, they can either be sent as extended ASCII or Unicode UTF-8 using quoted-printable transfer encoding.

So if you see this in the raw body
Code:
that=E2=80=99s
you should also see a Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable header and a Content-Type: charset="UTF-8" (or charset=utf8) header. This decodes in UTF-8 for the Right Single Quotation Mark character.

Yes, =EF=BF=BD is the Unicode UTF-8 coding for a diamond containing a question mark. I think that happens when there is a decoding error.

Bill
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Old 27 Dec 2018, 09:06 AM   #13
Berenburger
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Quote:
Originally Posted by xyzzy View Post
Hmm. The link works for me. But maybe because it's my own google account. Oh well, live and learn. Won't use that thing again. Thanks for the feedback.

Wonder what I can use where I can post a link that a non-account holder can use but can only see the one picture without seeing my entire library (album) of pictures. Let's try Photobucket.

https://i627.photobucket.com/albums/...psyu0pgge1.jpg

This time I logged out of the Photobucket account and that picture is still accessible by me. Should have done that in the first place since I've used Photobucket for years as a place to embed pictures in forum posts that actually support that feature.

Got a little off topic here. Sorry.
Our great FredOnline made a little tutorial of How to include an image in a EMD post.
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Old 27 Dec 2018, 05:48 PM   #14
xyzzy
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n5bb:
Thanks for that info. It helped my understand that Japanese test.

Berenburger:
That post you refer to doesn't embed an image in a EMD post. While it uses a different place to upload an image (Postimage.org) from the one I used (Photobucket) the end result is the same, i.e., just a link to the uploaded image. That's what I ended up doing in the post you quoted. But thanks anyhow, I can add Postimage.org top my collection of possible places to upload images.
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