MemeCode - Blog

Outlook and that stupid "J"

Date: 1/3/2011
Tags: email outlook

It seems to be common knowledge that people receiving email from Outlook users see a capital J instead of a smiley face if they are not using Outlook themselves. As I've been testing the IMAP behavior of Scribe and Thunderbird lately I noticed that both clients display Outlook's smiley face as a "J" and thought to myself, if I have spent so much effort making Apple's Emoji work that it's only fair that I at least have a look into why Outlook's smileys don't work.

There are a lot of "fixes" out there for the "problem", but I wanted to know the REAL reason why it happens. So here it is; Outlook wraps the smiley in the following HTML:

<span style='font-face:wingdings'> J</span>

There is the famous J character, but technically that markup is correct, if you open up Word, set the font to Wingdings and type 'J' you get a smiley. So what the hell? Initially I thought maybe my glyph substitution code was getting in the way, but after turning that off for wingdings it didn't help. So I looked at the font creation code and remembering something about ANSI vs SYMBOL charsets I hard coded anything with "wingdings" in the face name to use SYMBOL_CHARSET instead of ANSI_CHARSET when calling CreateFont.

Which fixes the problem, Scribe now renders the smiley characters correctly. There you go, now you know.

Now I can snicker quietly when Thunderbird renders them as 'J's ;)

Comments:

fret
12/03/2011 4:17am

You have got a SQLi in forum.php zone & A permanent XSS in the Blog

Ok I'll have a look into that. Thanks.

fret
13/03/2011 2:12pm

I've removed HTML support from the forum. You can use BBcode instead.

From:

Email (optional):

(Will be HTML encoded to evade harvesting)

Message:

Remember username and/or email in a cookie. Notify me of new posts in this thread via email.	BBcode: [q]text[/q] [url=link]description[/url] [img]url_to_image[/img] [pre]some_code[/pre] [b]bold_text[/b]

Sitemap