Greg Wooledge <g...@wooledge.org> wrote: > 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).
I think that is exactly the OP's point. It is somewhat likely that the recipient will be using a font that does not include the playing card glyphs, and the OP wonders why they aren't more universal in fonts. > 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. No, he's using a standard keyboard mechanism which works well inside gvim here for example, or in a normal terminal (lxterminal to be precise). You hold down CTRL and SHIFT and then press U. You should see an underlined lower case letter U. Now type the four digit code, e.g. 2660. You will see the digits be echoed, also underlined and perhaps with a coloured background. Now press ENTER and the whole lot is magically replaced with a 'black spade suit' glyph. > 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). ♠ it also appears to work directly in my MUA (claws). > 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. I suspect you may be right, which I find disappointing as an explanation for the phenomenon.
