Damn J’s in Thunderbird emails (smiley faces)

January 16, 2009 by Justin
Filed under: Raw & Uncategorized 

This has been annoying me for ages, smiley faces for Microsoft Outlook showing up as J’s in my Thunderbird emails. So here’s the fix:

  1. Go to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\res\ and create a ‘fonts’ folder.
  2. Create a file named fontEncoding.properties. You can right click in the fonts folder, then click create new ‘Text document’, then rename it.
  3. Open the fontEncoding.properties file with your favourite text editor.
  4. Add the following, save, close, then restart Mozilla Thunderbird:

# Symbol font
encoding.wingdings.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings2.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings3.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.webdings.ttf = windows-1252

Big thanks go to http://blog.tcg.com/tcg/2008/03/j-instead-of-sm.html

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Comments

18 Comments on Damn J’s in Thunderbird emails (smiley faces)

  1. Peter on Sun, 12th Jul 2009 7:53 am

    2. Thanks a million!!!
    That was a great help!!

    Best regards from Germany,
    Peter

  2. voltaire on Tue, 1st Sep 2009 11:50 pm

    3. thanks! that was bothering me for years!

  3. Justin on Thu, 3rd Sep 2009 10:27 am

    4. thanks for the comment. good to know it is helping people.

  4. David on Wed, 7th Oct 2009 6:23 am

    5. That was really bothering me too, and a fix was surprisingly hard to find on google! But I eventually found your page and it did the trick perfectly, thanks :)

  5. John on Wed, 21st Oct 2009 1:54 am

    6. wonderful!

  6. johnjcamilleri.com » j’s in Thunderbird emails Outlook smiley faces on Sat, 7th Nov 2009 10:12 pm

    7. [...] j’s in Thunderbird emails Outlook smiley faces | The Swan Song. Comments (0) [...]

  7. Adam on Wed, 30th Dec 2009 6:07 am

    8. Hey, thanks for the tip. I got stumped for a while though, because I just copy and pasted the file name from:

    “Open the fontEndoding.properties”

    I didn’t notice the typo endoding as opposed to encoding and couldn’t figure out what was up. Just thought I’d mention it in case anyone else gets stuck

    J!

  8. Justin on Wed, 30th Dec 2009 7:09 am

    9. thanks heaps Adam. Typo fixed :)

  9. Max on Wed, 3rd Feb 2010 6:41 am

    10. Workaround does not run under TB 3.0.1 :(

  10. Daniel Himmel » Thunderbird zeigt keine Smileys von Outlook-Mails an on Wed, 10th Feb 2010 7:08 am

    11. [...] Quelle: The Swan Song [...]

  11. Chris Harris on Fri, 26th Feb 2010 10:14 pm

    12. Thanks! J

  12. Chris Childs on Wed, 17th Mar 2010 6:57 pm

    13. Can’t get it working to display in Thunderebird 3.0.3
    Trying to get the upper case “P” in webdings to display the Path and Tree symbol. I get the green colour but all it shows is a bit fat “P”.

    Can you help please ??

  13. Justin on Wed, 17th Mar 2010 8:02 pm

    14. I haven’t been able to get it to work in TB 3 either. Have done some searching but not able to find a solution. Will post one if I find it. Could try the site I credited for this fix for a solution, but last time I looked they didn’t have a new fix either.

    Cheers, Justin

  14. Kari on Mon, 10th May 2010 2:58 am

    15. Does anyone know how to get this to work in Windows 7? I am not able to create a folder in the fonts folder, nor can I create the fontEncoding.properties to be moved over to that folder. :(

  15. Justin on Mon, 31st May 2010 9:52 pm

    16. You will most likely need to action these as the administrator (at best guess). I don’t have Win 7 to test with sorry.

  16. n on Sat, 26th Jun 2010 9:15 am

    17. great fix.

  17. Harsha on Thu, 22nd Jul 2010 11:28 am

    18. Worked like a charm! Thank you very much.

  18. nmp on Sat, 24th Jul 2010 3:35 am

    19. To those who are having problems saving files to your C: on Windows 7 or vista:

    Method 1: Run the program that you use to save the file as an administrator

    1. Right-click the shortcut that starts the program, and then click Run as Administrator to start the program. If the Run as Administrator option is not available, follow these steps:
    1. Right-click the shortcut that starts the program, and then click Properties.
    2. Click the Shortcut tab, and then click Open File Location.
    3. Right-click the executable file for the program, and then click Run as Administrator to start the program.
    Note If the program was installed by using an .msi package file, you must locate the executable file for the program to run it as an administrator. For example, a shortcut to a Microsoft Office program does not include the Run as Administrator option.
    2. Save the file.

    Method 2: Save the file to the Documents folder and then move it to the destination folder

    1. Save the file to the Documents folder.
    2. Right-click the file that you saved in step 1, and then click Cut.
    3. Click Start
    Collapse this imageExpand this image
    Start button
    , click Computer, right-click the destination folder, and then click Paste.
    4. Type the administrator password when you are prompted.

    Also, when you save the text file, make sure the other .properties files are visible in that folder (this you do this by changing “save as type-text” to All Files.

    Having said all of this, the proposed solution in this article to the “J” issue did not work for me as I am using Thunderbird 3.06.

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