[Gloucs] Type faces.

[Bob Henson]

On Wed, 2011-11-23 at 18:56 +0000, GEOFF BAGLEY wrote:
> See below.
> 
> --- On Wed, 23/11/11, Bob Henson <robert.h.henson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > From: Bob Henson <robert.h.henson at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Gloucs] Type faces.
> > To: gloucs at mailman.lug.org.uk
> > Date: Wednesday, 23 November, 2011, 17:04
> > On Wed, 2011-11-23 at 15:06 +0000,
> > GEOFF BAGLEY wrote:
> > > I am playing with Debian Icedove.
> > > 
> > > Who determines the received type font of a
> > message,  the sender or
> > > the recipient?
> > 
> > The recipient determines the displayed font.
> > 
> > > I am hoping to inclease the size and boldness of
> > incoming mail.
> > 
> > If Icedove is exactly the same as the Thunderbird on which
> > it is based,
> > the settings are under Edit > Preferences > Display
> > > Formatting >
> > Advanced. You may need to set different settings depending
> > on the
> > inbound character encoding - there's a tab at the top of
> > the page to
> > select different encodings. Thunderbird very confusingly
> > calls them
> > "languages" not encodings - most are self explanatory, but
> > I recall you
> > need to set "Other Languages" to cope with UTF-8. It has
> > always been
> > very difficult in Thunderbird/Icedove.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> > Bob
> 
> Thanks Bob.
> 
> I am now getting some of the received mail lines in bold but others
> still thin/feint .  
> I am still trying.
> 
> A problem is my ignorance of all the terminology, particularly the names of all the type faces/encodings/languages.
> 

This might help with working out which languages are represented by the
various encodings - or it might make it more confusing :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding

You can get the name of the character encoding that a particular message
uses by typing Ctrl-U whilst the message is selected and looking for the
Content-type: header. If you cannot display that particular message as
you want it, find the language to which it relates, and make another
Icedove page to suit it, as mentioned before.

For example if you get a message encoded with ISO-8859-7 and it won't
display correctly, look it up and you'll find it relates to Greek. Go
into the Icedove/Thunderbird settings and select the Greek page, and
insert your desired settings there. That should cope with your Greek
friends :-)

I hope this is helping and not muddying the waters even further. I had
the *greatest* of difficulty getting the hang of Thunderbird's method of
doing this, and haven't cracked it yet. It's wasn't entirely my fault -
Thunderbird has a weird way of doing things. It's worth persevering with
it  - it's otherwise a pretty good program. I found that nearly
everything that came in here was covered by setting pages for "Western",
"Other Languages", and "User defined". I may well go back to it - I'm
trying out Evolution now, and that's very flaky indeed.

Best of luck, anyway.

Regards,

Bob