Mozilla has removed the DISPLAY category under OPTIONS, so there's no way now to fix the "funny character" issue fom double spades--NOW what do we do?
Several people have complained that double spaces get converted to "funny characters". Some fixes have been offered, but they all depend on changing the character encoding, which used to be under OPTIONS, DISPLAY. The latest revision of T Bird has done away with the DISPLAY choice, so there's no way of change the encoding. One user says the problem is caused by ATT and Bellsouth, but at least there was a workaround. Now there isn't. What are we supposed to do? Live with crappy email?
Every time the user inserts a "double space" such as after a period at the end of a sentence, or between paragraphs, it gets encoded as �. Two sets of double spaces will print out at the receiving end as ��
The problem occurs regardless of whether the checkbox is checked or not, and it occurs when the outbound encoding is UTF-8 or ISO 8859-1. the characters are hex codes EF, BF, BD, which in UTF-8 happens to be the Unicode "replacement" character to be used when the receiver does not understand the encoding.
Jorg K wrote on 2/4/2018 the following: If the customer sends in windows-1252 and includes for example special punctuation characters or a non-break space xA0, the ISP doesn't correctly interpret the the message as windows-1252 but as UTF-8. In UTF-8, xA0 is not valid and gets replaced by the so-called replacement character, � (0xEF 0xBF 0xBD).
Since the e-mail is still windows-1252 encoded, the recipient's client displays �.
See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427636 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1435536
Affected users should complain heavily to their mail providers. As a workaround, they need to send all messages as UTF-8.
Unfortunately, his fix no longer works as there appears to be no way to send all messages as UTF-8.
All Replies (3)
I have not noticed any changes in the menus. Which one exactly is "the latest" Thunderbird?
As an aside, I thought double spaces after a period were a bit of a niche practice, and so I hadn't thought to consider it as a common causative action. At work, in a department with a headcount of some 20 employees, there is exactly one who uses the two spaces, and with any document of his that I get to work on, I routinely swap all the double spaces for singles, so that there won't be any variations in style if others contribute to the document. He hasn't noticed yet. ;-)
Thank you for replying.
I'm using Version 52.6.0 (32-bit) of T-Bird. I see there is a V 52.7.0 now available. I've used two spaces following a period since the 1950s, when I was taught to do so in my high school typing class. It's also common practice in setting book text and was incorporated automatically by the Mergenthaller Linotype machines which were the backbone of the newspaper industry.
I won't argue the single space versus double space, as it's something of a matter of taste, although to my eye, the single space looks out of place. The point is that whatever the user types...be it spaces, errors, or Teletype Art, should be accepted and by the machine and the software, and transmitted without distortion or changes.
Double- and multiple-space sequences result in my emails cluttered with � characters....sometimes long passages of them.
I don't recall the last version of Thunderbird that allowed the user to pick and choose among the various encoding standards, but it was still possible a few weeks or months ago, before the Thank you for replying.
I'm using Version 52.6.0 (32-bit) of T-Bird. I see there is a V 52.7.0 now available. I've used two spaces following a period since the 1950s, when I was taught to do so in my high school typing class. It's also common practice in setting book fonts and was accommodated easily in the Mergenthaller Linotype machines which were the backbone of the newspaper industry.
I won't argue the single space versus double space, as it's something of a matter of taste, although to my eye, the single space looks out of place. The double space is frequently used (by me) to line up columns, indent paragraphs, and many other things. A bit of air in a paragraph enhances readability and is more attractive visually, I think.
Double- and multiple-space sequences result in my emails cluttered with � character strings....sometimes long passages of them. The point is that the machine and the software should accept whatever the writer types, with single spaces or many spaces, and transmit if faithfully without change or distortion.
I'm not sure when Thunderbird changed, but as recently as a few weeks or months ago, users were able to pick and choose among several encoding schemes--UTF-8, various ISO standards, Windows, and so on. That user choice seems to have disappeared now. It's been perhaps five or six months since the people I write to (and write for) started complaining about the extraneous strings of strange characters in the pieces I was emailing to them. Since that time, the problem has never gone away.
Can Mozilla come up with a software tweak to prevent the double- and multiple-space from being trashed by the transmission medium?
Thanks again for your our help.
Barrie Britton RIverside, CA
Modified by BarrieBritton
Agreed, text should by and large be sent verbatim. There is no reason for double spaces to be interfered with, especially as they may be used deliberately by the author for spacing. But stuff like smart quotes and automatic conversion to em-dash are supposedly all there to support typographical conventions, so in a "helpful" editor like Word, I wouldn't be too surprised if multiple spaces were re-interpreted. Mind you, double spaces wouldn't necessarily be preserved by html; it has a somewhat cavalier disregard for white-space characters.
The options in Thunderbird for encoding are just where I found them last time I looked.
For viewing the current message, View|Text Encoding can be found in both menu systems.
For what is used when composing messages,
Tools|Options|Display|Formatting and then click the Advanced button.
In the Application Menu, that's under Preferences|Preferences here in Linux; I think that is Options|Options in Windows.