Garbled text in Entourage

D

Dan

Can anyone help solve this mystery? TIA.

Some incoming email, always from the same senders, appears as nonsense
in my Inbox and also if opened in its own window. The words are random
and the letters are not quite roman--vaguely cyrillic. (I'll forward a
screen grab if that'd help.)

However, if I compose a Reply To or a Forward to the same message, the
text appears perfectly.

One sender thought his original font was Comic Sans. I can compose a
New message in Comic Sans without problem.

And finally, the garbled text appears in both new email and also when I
view old email from the same sender, originally sent to my old machine.
In other words, the same email that looked fine in Outlook Express 5 on
ancient OS 8.6 now is unreadable in Entourage 11.1.0 on Tiger 10.4.1.

Any ideas?

Again, thanks.

--Dan
 
M

matt neuburg

Dan said:
Can anyone help solve this mystery? TIA.

Some incoming email, always from the same senders, appears as nonsense
in my Inbox and also if opened in its own window. The words are random
and the letters are not quite roman--vaguely cyrillic. (I'll forward a
screen grab if that'd help.)

However, if I compose a Reply To or a Forward to the same message, the
text appears perfectly.
Click to expand...

What happens if you change the encoding (Format > Character Set)? What
happens if you view the source (View > Source)? m.
 
D

Dan

Matt said:
What happens if you change the encoding (Format > Character Set)? What
happens if you view the source (View > Source)? m.
Click to expand...

The text reads fine in View> Source.
Changing Format> Character Set had no visible effect of any kind, good
or bad.

Dan
 
B

Barry Wainwright

Can anyone help solve this mystery? TIA.

Some incoming email, always from the same senders, appears as nonsense
in my Inbox and also if opened in its own window. The words are random
and the letters are not quite roman--vaguely cyrillic. (I'll forward a
screen grab if that'd help.)

However, if I compose a Reply To or a Forward to the same message, the
text appears perfectly.

One sender thought his original font was Comic Sans. I can compose a
New message in Comic Sans without problem.

And finally, the garbled text appears in both new email and also when I
view old email from the same sender, originally sent to my old machine.
In other words, the same email that looked fine in Outlook Express 5 on
ancient OS 8.6 now is unreadable in Entourage 11.1.0 on Tiger 10.4.1.

Any ideas?

Again, thanks.

--Dan
Click to expand...

Mangled text in some Complex HTML messages is a known issue, but I don't
believe anyone knows quite what the cause is.

The work-round to stop it happening is to turn off the display of complex
HTM in the Security pane of the preferences.
 
D

Dan

Barry wrote
The work-round to stop it happening is to turn off the display of complex
HTM in the Security pane of the preferences.
Click to expand...

Bingo. That solved the problem. But the cure is worse than the disease.
Too many otherwise readable and attractive messages become too uniform.
I'll live with having to "Reply" to decode a few emails.
Thanks Barry and Matt for your help.

--Dan
 
C

Christopher Pressey

I've experienced the same problem - I've found it's affected by what
fonts I have active in my system at any given time - I'm a designer so
I use a lot/turn a lot on and off regularly. Sometimes, (and I think
helvetica.dfont is a heavy player in this from experience with it)
there's a font conflict that turns Entourage messages as well as some
web pages in FireFox to garbage.

Resetting my fonts or rebooting into my "standard" or base set of fonts
generally fixes the problem for a while.
 
D

Dan

Christopher said:
I've experienced the same problem - I've found it's affected by what
fonts I have active in my system at any given time - I'm a designer so
I use a lot/turn a lot on and off regularly. Sometimes, (and I think
helvetica.dfont is a heavy player in this from experience with it)
there's a font conflict that turns Entourage messages as well as some
web pages in FireFox to garbage.

Resetting my fonts or rebooting into my "standard" or base set of fonts
generally fixes the problem for a while.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Christopher. That sounds applicable, including the occasional
web page.
I have a lot of active fonts, which I use for different clients.

Now, pardon what I'm sure is an extremely basic question: What do you
mean by "resetting" your fonts?

TIA.

--Dan
 
C

Cristy Pazera

Helvetica is a heavy player in the issue, but not necessarily
Helvetica.dfont. Our office does graphic design, and we find this problem
occurs when our font management utility activates a version of Helvetica
with the same name but different font ID as an already active version of
Helvetica. Helvetica seems to multiply faster than rabbits at our office, so
we easily have two dozen folders on our server and individual computers
containing Helvetica.
 
C

Christopher Pressey

Sorry - my personal term - makes sense to me, but not to anyone else...


By "Reset" I mean turning off all the extra (non-system critical) fonts
that I turned on over the past few days for various projects and then
was too lazy to turn off when I was done. Restarting does the same
thing as long as you don't have Suitcase set to automatically activate
certain fonts on restart.
 
Top