[Alpine-info] UTF-8 test message for your viewing (dis?)pleasure

[Mike Miller]

On Sat, 7 Mar 2009, Mike Miller wrote:


> The text file is here in case anyone else wants to test font and 

> terminal:

>

> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt


It is also good to check it out in browsers and other mail systems.  For 
browsers, you have to choose View -> Encodings -> UTF-8.

In Firefox on Ubuntu things look pretty great with very few characters 
missing, but the alignment of brackets on the right side of the math 
section near the top is slightly off, which makes that part hard to read. 
It does have the Ethiopian, for what that's worth.  I'll call it a tie 
with urxvt because urxvt didnt' have Ethiopian but urxvt handled the math 
correctly.

In Firefox on Windows it looks pretty bad -- missing many characters and 
the box alignments are bad.  Even the "Nicer typography" box is off in the 
region of the Euro symbol.  The Thai does not align.

Google's Chrome browser on Windows has pretty much the identical problems 
of Firefox on Windows, so this might mostly be a Windows font issue.

Gmail in Google Chrome on Windows -- pretty bad, even worse than in either 
browser on Windows viewing the text file.

Gmail in Firefox on Windows -- equally as bad, as Gmail in Chrome and 
definitely worse than the text file in Firefox browser on Windows.

Gmail in Firefox on Ubuntu -- much better, in a way, because all of the 
characters are there as they were when UTF-8-demo.txt was viewed in the 
Firefox browser window on Ubuntu.  The major problem:  alignment.  Nothing 
aligns correctly.  It's like viewing a proportional-spaced font that was 
supposed to have been a fixed-width font.

mini breakthrough:

A big part of the problem with Gmail is that it does not display plain 
text in a fixed-width font.  This is quite astonishing when you consider 
all the implications and that Google people are computer geniuses.  The 
"breakthrough" here is that Firefox has an extension called GreaseMonkey 
and someone wrote a script for GreaseMonkey that fixes the font problem in 
Gmail without messing up other things.  Once I added the GreaseMonkey 
extension to Firefox on Ubuntu and installed the script, my UTF-8 message 
looked fantastic.  It was probably identical to how it looked in Firefox 
on Ubuntu.

I did find a couple of problems.  One is that it sometimes does not 
present something correctly (e.g., a table of numbers aligned using 
spaces) when there are spaces at the beginnings of the lines.  It also has 
a problem when a new a sentence ends with a period and two spaces before 
the beginning of the next sentence -- when it wraps between the sentences 
the next line will begin with a space, which makes it look like a new 
paragraph when it isn't.

Mike