[ubuntu-uk] thunderbird fonts

[Norman Silverstone]

On 05/06/12 18:57, Jim Price wrote:
> 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).
>
Thank you very much for this very clear explanation, things are now 
dropping into place. I found that the only really effective way to alter 
the font size was by altering the "Minimum font size" setting. I seem to 
remember reading in one of the leads from Google that there is an issue 
with UTF-8 in the current version of Thunderbird. Thanks again.

Norman