On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 12:04:53PM -0400, Thomas George wrote:
> I am amazed that the playing card symbols spade, heart, diamond and club
> don't appear any of the collections in my Debian Buster programs. I can
> insert them in the text I type by entering CTRL-SHIFT-Uunicode but if this
> text in a Thunderbird email to a friend he receives only the unicode.

If you paste, or type, one of these Unicode characters into the body
of your email, and if your Mail User Agent correctly encodes it and
sets the right MIME headers, then it should work as intended.

♣ ♦ ♥ ♠

I'm using mutt, and it looks like mutt is going to send this message
encoded as "text/plain, 8bit, utf-8".

The reading MUA will have to be able to display these characters (something
about fonts, which are not my strong point).

Just to be clear, are you using some kind of Desktop Environment specific
means of entering these Unicode characters?  I don't know what
CTRL-SHIFT-Uunicode means.  If I try it here, it just gets interpreted
as Ctrl-U which kills the line I'm typing in vim.

The way I entered these characters was, first, to look up their Unicode
values on the web (2660, 2663, 2665 and 2666).  Then in a terminal running
bash, I used printf '\u2660\n' and so on.  I used the mouse to copy and
paste the characters from that terminal into this one, where I'm writing
this email (in vim, in mutt, in screen, in rxvt-unicode).

I could also have copy/pasted the characters from the web page where I
found their Unicode code point numbers.

> I don't understand why these symbols are not as ubiquitous as all the smiley
> faces.

Well, I guess card games are not as popular among the younger crowd.

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