Bug 3356 - characters outside range of the default font may not display at all
Summary: characters outside range of the default font may not display at all
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: Claws Mail (GTK 2)
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Plugins/Fancy (show other bugs)
Version: 3.11.1
Hardware: PC Linux
: P3 major
Assignee: users
URL:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2014-12-30 12:24 UTC by zorgeloos
Modified: 2015-01-15 23:18 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:


Attachments
source of the mail that I tested (2.69 KB, message/rfc822)
2014-12-30 12:24 UTC, zorgeloos
no flags Details
Test email in current git version (34.02 KB, image/png)
2014-12-31 18:44 UTC, Ricardo Mones
no flags Details

Description zorgeloos 2014-12-30 12:24:00 UTC
Created attachment 1463 [details]
source of the mail that I tested

Depending on the range of characters available in the default sans or serif font, and the font-family line, characters outside that range may not be displayed. In fact, the only way to display for instance Japanese, is to define a Japanese font that MUST be on the receivers system, and NOT define fonts that are NOT on the receivers system. For example,  with 'Meiryo' not on my system,  and 'Sazanami Mincho',reikofont available: 

body style="font-family: serif"   --- does NOT display Japanese
body style="font-family: Meiryo,reikofont,serif"   --- does NOT display Japanese 
body style="font-family: reikofont,serif    ---- displays Japanese with reikofont
body style="font-family: 'Sazanami Mincho',reikofont,serif   --- displays Japanese with Sazanami Mincho
Comment 1 Ricardo Mones 2014-12-31 18:44:01 UTC
Created attachment 1464 [details]
Test email in current git version

I've edited the mail you attached to use only serif and I can see the Japanese text, as shown in the attached image.

Not sure what your claim is, but if the receiver has chosen a font whose character set cannot display Japanese it's impossible for Claws Mail to fix that.
Comment 2 zorgeloos 2015-01-04 10:19:04 UTC
Thanks. 

If Japanese displays correctly at your end with only a serif font defined, I suppose that might mean that there must be something wrong with my system. It never occurred to me that that might be the case, because other html displaying programs can display Japanese with a serif font just fine (I think they depend on fontconfig and I realize now that claws must do the same, but I don't know what that exactly means in a technical sense for this problem; perhaps the error is in my fontconfig?). 

> Not sure what your claim is, but if the receiver has chosen a font whose character set cannot display Japanese it's impossible for Claws Mail to fix that.

My claim was that with only a serif font defined, only the default serif font of my system seemed to be used for display in claws. And no, my default serif font does not contain Japanese glyphs; as far as I know it's fontconfig that provides the fall back to serif fonts that do contain Japanese glyphs; at least other programs on my system use fontconfig that way. 

As I understood it thus far, a program that uses fontconfig can only fail to display Japanese, if there is no font containing Japanese glyphs on that system at all. I've got lots. 

I was also surprised that this line failed: 
body style="font-family: Meiryo,reikofont,serif"   --- does NOT display Japanese 

I don't have Meiryo, but I do have reikofont (which is a Japanese font). 

Anyway, I'm prepared to accept that somethings wrong with my system (perhaps there is something wrong with my fonts.conf or something) and that this bug is bogus. Sorry to have bothered you guys.

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.