[ubuntu-uk] thunderbird fonts

[Jim Price]

On 05/06/12 14:48, Norman Silverstone wrote:
> I have asked this question on another users group but so far, I have not
> had an answer which works. Using Thunderbird 12.0.1 and Xubuntu 12.04
> 32-bit plain text the font in the message window is very small and I
> want to make it larger. I have tried making changes using Edit ->
> Preferences -> Display -> Formatting -> Advanced but nothing changes. I
> assume I am missing something but I don't know what. I have tried Google
> but I am more confused than ever. Could someone, please, be kind enough
> to point me to where I might find the answer to the problem. Thanks

In the dialog you refer to, the first setting is "Fonts for:". Each 
message has a label on it, which you don't normally see, which specifies 
the way in which the contents are to be interpreted. The likelihood is 
that almost all of the messages you receive will be encoded by the 
sender using "Western", or possibly "Central European". You can have 
different sized fonts for different encodings, so the chances are that 
when you see a message which you can't change the font size, it means 
that message is encoded with a setting other than the one you are trying 
to change the size of. You didn't mention whether that is something 
which you have already tried, but have a look at the headers using 
"View>Headers>All" and look for the "Content type" setting. That should 
tell you how the sender has encoded the message, and give a clue as to 
what you need to do to make sure that you know what encoding of font to 
change in the advanced settings.

Try settings "Fonts for" to "Western" and see if that makes any difference.

I see from your settings that you have outging mail set to "US ASCII". I 
have mine set to "Unicode (UTF-8)", which is the standard encoding in 
Ubuntu, and backwards compatible with "US ASCII". If you send email to 
Windows users which contains foreign language characters, they may not 
see them correctly if their email client doesn't read the headers and 
display UTF-8 correctly, but if you don't write emails in a foreign 
language, that won't affect you or them using UTF-8. You can also set 
incoming mail to Unicode (UTF-8), and if you do see character errors in 
an incoming email, you can correct that by selecting "View>character 
encoding>western" (or whatever it says in their headers they have 
encoded it with).

Try unchecking "Allow messages to use other fonts".

Check "use fixed width fonts for plain text messages", and after you 
have done that, the setting which affects font size in messages should 
be the one labelled "Monospace".

Worst case is you should be able to change the font size (if it needs to 
be bigger) with the "Minimum font size" setting.

That's about all I can think of for now. I am a little surprised that 
Ubuntu didn't set up UTF-8 in Thunderbird (which was the case last time 
I did a fresh install, which was a while ago as the profile I'm using 
now originated in Thunderbird 2).

-- 
Intellect is about thought.
Property is crime.
Intellectual property ~ Thought crime.
JimP