[SOLVED] Thunderbird fonts

[kateto]

Hello all,
Here on a well updated Mageia 6 I can't change Thunderbird's font. I go to Edit > Preferences > Display > Format > Advanced and I tinker with the font settings, but the preview pane and the message edit window keep displaying the same tiny ugly font.
Strangely enough, Thunderbird does use the background colour that I set there.
I've also tinkered with Kcontrol, to no avail. I'm using KDE (or Plasma, or whatever it's called these days).
Where am I supposed to do it? Has anybody the same problem?

[doktor5000]

I go to Edit > Preferences > Display > Format > Advanced and I tinker with the font settings

With what did you tinker exactly, and to what did you change it?

[kateto]

Tipus de lletra per a: Llatí
Proporcional: Sans serif Mida: 56
Serif: Futura
Sans-serif: Dei Gratia
Monoespai: Geneva Mida: 22
Mida mínima de lletra: 14

Does it really matter? I changed the values to very peculiar fonts to look for visible changes. But the changes are applied only when I choose to view the message content as "simple HTML", whereas I prefer to see my mail as plain text, but then Thunderbid shows some little ugly font that makes my eyes ache. I don't know which one it is nor can find from where Thunderbird is picking the value for plain text font. Besides, there's no way to define the font for the preview pane, it always appears as plain text, unless I click on a folded thread, then it appears as HTML. When I write a message, for the text it uses whatever font I've defined as monospace. In sum, it's all mangled up.

[AstorBG]

Hi kateto, I use a thunderbird extension/addon called "Theme Font & Size Changer". Therein, you can adjust the fonts and even the themes.
It might be helpful for you.
Cheers,

Astor

[kateto]

The addon Theme Font & Size Changer only changes the user interface rather than the message body, that's not my problem.

Finally I could get a more readable font by unchecking the option "Use monospace font for plain text messages".
However I have no idea of what font it is. It's some serif font that I haven't chosen in the "Advanced" option dialog.
So the mistery remains: how the hell does Thunderbid choose fonts for plain text messages?

[martinw]

It uses the font you've selected as the "monospace" font unless you uncheck that option. But there are multiple settings, one for each of the text encodings selected in the "Font for" drop down box at the top of the "Advanced" dialogue. You can view/change the text encoding of a message via the View->Text Encoding menu.

It's made more confusing because the names in the "Font for" drop down box don't exactly match the names in the View->Text Encoding menu.

[isadora]

At Lifewire's i found this article:
https://www.lifewire.com/change-default ... rd-1173143

[kateto]

martinw is right. Today I found that for every message with the header "Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"" the fonts are set by choosing "Other writing systems" in the "Font for" drop down menu, even if the message content is just plain English.

Actually this is a bug. VERY VERY BAD user interface design. And even WORSE documentation. It seems Thunderbird is packed with obsolete stuff; who the hell would now label UTF-8 as "Other writing systems"?

[doktor5000]

Actually this is a bug. VERY VERY BAD user interface design. And even WORSE documentation. It seems Thunderbird is packed with obsolete stuff; who the hell would now label UTF-8 as "Other writing systems"?

Well, feel free to send in a patch for this to upstream.

You are aware that thunderbird is not maintained by Mozilla, but only by volunteers / unpaid contributors, basically the same as with Mageia?