[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.
>
> 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."

And here, unifont showed them as empty boxes. So does that point the 
finger of guilt to kmail? This is the TDE, R14.0.5 version. Hundreds of 
bugs fixed since the fork at KDE-3.5.

> 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

I'll leave it set to use this unifont & see how it displays the 
smileys ;-)


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>