You are not logged in.
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
#1 2014-06-16 01:47:35
- Salkay
- Member
- Registered: 2014-05-22
- Posts: 683
Horrible font in some messages in Thunderbird
In Thunderbird, normally my fixed-width font looks pretty good, both in message bodies and when I view source (shown here).
However, for particular messages, it looks ridiculously bad. It's a skinny, unaliased font with wide horizontal space between glyphs. I get this in some message bodies, and when I view source for these specific messages I get this same font.
This is in a message body, with some vertical overlap too.
This is when you view source.
Further, normally I can adjust the font size when viewing source, but in these cases it doesn't respond, which must surely be a related bug. I've tried modifying the fonts used in Thunderbird's prefs, but they don't seem to affect it.
TB 24.6.0
Offline
#3 2014-06-16 07:02:33
- Salkay
- Member
- Registered: 2014-05-22
- Posts: 683
Re: Horrible font in some messages in Thunderbird
Yes, I actually have 17 add-ons enabled, including Thunderbird Conversations. However, I just attempted restarting in Safe Mode, and I still see this behaviour.
Offline
#5 2014-06-16 07:10:57
- Salkay
- Member
- Registered: 2014-05-22
- Posts: 683
Re: Horrible font in some messages in Thunderbird
I tried disabling "tweak chrome fonts" and "tweak body fonts" in Thunderbird Conversations, then restarted, but this made no difference.
(However, as stated before, I tried restarting in Safe Mode, so I don't think that it's an add-on to blame.)
Offline
#7 2014-06-16 11:56:52
- Salkay
- Member
- Registered: 2014-05-22
- Posts: 683
Re: Horrible font in some messages in Thunderbird
Hm, I did have some stuff in ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/ to fix hinting issues with TeX fonts, but I just tried moving them out and restarting Thunderbird, and it made no difference. I don't have anything like infinality installed.
I actually suspect it might be more than just font rendering issues though, since I also cannot zoom the source window. That seems like it shouldn't depend on the font itself (unless plausibly the font is of fixed size for some reason).
Offline
#9 2014-06-16 14:59:43
- Salkay
- Member
- Registered: 2014-05-22
- Posts: 683
Re: Horrible font in some messages in Thunderbird
Ah, I've just noticed that it occurs when the emails are encoded with Chinese Simplified (GB2312), and the font is named "sans-serif". I can change the font to, say, Arial, and it looks fine. Alternatively, I can change the encoding to UTF-8 or even Chinese Traditional, and it looks fine. I just tested by sending an email to myself with those two settings, and I can see the same ugly font in the composition window and the received email.
Offline
#11 2014-06-16 15:21:47
- Salkay
- Member
- Registered: 2014-05-22
- Posts: 683
Re: Horrible font in some messages in Thunderbird
I actually haven't found the solution yet, but I've certainly isolated the problem. I've searched the web for this problem, but I can't find a solution. If there are incoming emails encoded as Chinese Simplified, but the font is defined okay, then there should be some way to make them look decent!
Offline