[Evolution] About emoticons and colors (was: How to set the default text color)

[Ángel <angel 16bits net>]

On 2019-08-16 at 21:50 +0200, Ralf Mardorf via evolution-list wrote:
> A few 😃?
>
> If you communicate with the majority using HTML, than you better use
> another MUA, since if you use Evolution, the averaged Windows
> recipient
> usually sees cut inline pictures and/or different font sizes, let
> alone
> that you should care about to install every crappy Windows font, to
> see
> all those special chars that are even not part of UTF8 [1].
I can view most of them just fine, without having Microsoft fonts
installed. They *are* part of Unicode
(and UTF-8 is a codification of Unicode, it doesn't define which
characters are mapped to which codepoint, just the way those codepoints
are formatted into bytes).

The case where you _would_ need a Windows font is when people include a
river or a smiley from Microsoft Outlook, which is in Windings font, and
if you don't have that installed you eg. see a “P” which is where the
font designers decided to put that picture.

It is arguable if there should be codepoints assigned that allow
rendering British-cow-blinking-an-eye-with-brown-skin.
And it is rightly a headache to render properly, since there are quite
odd combining characters in play. But with a sane stack, if I don't have
any font able to render them, it will show as a character, that I could
lookup, rather than wonder what does such lone P mean in a paragraph.

And having a codepoint assigned means I can use a different font, and I
should still be able to get a proper rendering (modulo some small
variations, eg. the case of 'weapon gun' vs 'toy gun').




> Emails aren't the same as ink on paper. What you see, e.g. blue font
> on a white background is sent via markup language and not necessarily
> does look as you expect on the receivers machine. While the colouring
> between Evolution and other e.g. Windows MUAs is compatible, I'm not
> aware of colour mismatches, there are other things to consider.
> Recipients might want to use individual font sizes and colour themes
> that makes reading emails for them more pleasant.

This. Some people set a dark mode for their mail client, with a default
of white (or light gray) text over black background. Which then makes
messages with an explicit text color difficult to read for them (eg.
they end up selecting text in order to view it!). At least, if you pick
a color, pick them all [1]. 

Best regards


1- https://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/color