Re: [Evolution] Character encoding specified in Content-Type field of outgoing messages

[Alex Viskovatoff <member viskov fastmail fm>]

Thanks for your reply. I am now less mystified.

On Mon, 2003-04-07 at 11:35, Dan Winship wrote:

> Does the character display as a euro symbol when you view the message as
> iso-8859-1? 

No - this works correctly.
> The message does not inherently have "a euro symbol" in it, it has an
> 0xA4 byte in it. When you view the message as iso-8859-1, that byte gets
> converted to Unicode character U+00A4...

Thanks for clearing that up. I had suspected that this is what was going
on, but couldn't be sure, since I didn't know that Evolution uses
Unicode internally.

> The fact that users ever have to know about character encodings is a
> bug. The way it should work is that you should just be able to type
> stuff, and the mailer will handle encoding everything correctly so that
> the recipient sees what you typed. The menu exists because things don't
> always work that nicely in the real world, but it's only there as a
> hint. "*IF* you can send this message in iso-8859-15, then please do so,
> rather than using iso-8859-1". But if the message can't be encoded in
> 8859-15, there's absolutely no reason why Evolution would want to try,
> since that can't possibly do the right thing.

Fair enough. You might consider making Evolution issue a warning like
"Can't use selected encoding", to make it clear to users that their
wishes being ignored is not a bug.

> > Evolution's second-guessing the user as to which character set to use
> > becomes more problematic under the following scenario...
>
> That sounds like a bug in the behavior of "insert text file". Might be
> improved in 1.4 though.

That would be nice. When Evolution inserts a text file, the natural
behavior would be for it to convert to Unicode using the character
encoding currently selected by the user. I just tried inserting a file
containing text encoded in KOI8-R, with KOI8-R being selected as the
encoding in the composer window, and the Russian text did not display
correctly, even though I had a KOI8-R font selected under "Font
Preferences". (Oddly enough, it just displayed as squiggles, not as the
corresponding ISO 88859-15 characters.)

The problem of needing to be able to send and read messages both in
German and in Russian raises the following issue and feature request.
Currently, preferred fonts are selected globally, for all character
encodings. But there is no (non-Unicode) font that can display both
German and Russian text. So each time I switch from German to Russian
messages, I need to change my preferred font. It would be nice if one
could choose a different preferred font for each character encoding (or
at least language), the way this is done in Web browsers.

Alex