[OT] Re: has sourceforge exposed the dirty little secret ?

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 07 January 2018 19:04:12 Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 10:50 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> 
wrote:
> > On Sunday 07 January 2018 17:37:14 Random832 wrote:
> >> On Sun, Jan 7, 2018, at 17:27, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >> > > 🐍 💻
> >> >
> >> > But here its broken and I am looking at two pairs of vertical
> >> > boxes because it is not properly mime'd. If you use chars or
> >> > gliphs from a non-default charset, it needs to demarcated with a
> >> > mime-boundary marker followed by the new type definition. Your
> >> > email/news agent did not do that.
> >>
> >> UTF-8 is the default character set, and anyway his message does
> >> have a content-type of 'text/plain; charset="utf-8";
> >> Format="flowed"'. Your environment not having font support and/or
> >> support for non-BMP characters is not a deficiency in the message.
> >
> > That, now that you mention it, could also effect this as I see it,
> > my default kmail message body font is hack 14 in deference to the
> > age of my eyes.
> >
> > My system default font is I believe utf-8. That is not a kmail
> > settable option. But if I uncheck the "use custom fonts", it is
> > still two pair of character outlines. So to what family of fonts do
> > these characters belong?
>
> You're conflating a few different things here. The character set is
> the Universal Character Set, basically synonymous with "Unicode". The
> encoding is UTF-8 and is a way to represent Unicode characters as
> bytes. The transfer encoding is base 64 (sometimes called "MIME
> encoding"), at least in the email version of it - I don't know what
> the original NG post used, and it may have been different. The font
> used is a mapping from character codes to displayable glyphs.
>
That was looking at the original message.  And its body was indeed a blob 
of base64.

> Everything except the font is under the sender's control, and (at
> least in the mailing list version) was all fine. If your font can't
> handle those characters, the font renderer should still recognize that
> they are characters, and put boxes (maybe with the codepoints written
> in them).
>
> On my Debian Linux systems, I can "sudo apt install unifont" to grab a
> font that's used as a fallback for any characters not found in other
> fonts. Quoting from the package's description:
>
> "The philosophy behind this font, though, is that anything meaningful
> is better than an empty box for an unknown glyph."
>
> It's not perfect, but it's way better than nothing. I don't know how
> many of the emoji are included, but it's worth a try.
>
> ChrisA


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>