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

[Chris Angelico]

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."

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