Ubuntu
thunderbird package

unicode support for thunderbird address book

Asked by seng

Alright,

I got a thunderbird problem.

I installed Chinese Outlook and exported my contacts into a CSV file.
Now what I did was to convert the file(which was in GB18030 code) to Unicode UTF8

After importing the CSV file to Thunderbird it shows me squares and stuff, obviously Thunderbird doesnt have the fonts.

Next step was to create a contact in my thunderbird address book with chinese characters.
No problem. It displays it correctly.

Now I exported my address book into a ldif file.

After opening it with Gedit my name which is 苏和盛

appears this way: Y2495ZKM55ubIOiLjyxtYWlsPXNlbmdAeGluZG9uZ3lhbmcuY29t

So I think I have two ways of solving this problem.

1. Installing the right fonts for thunderbird( I dont know how)
2. to change all chinese characters into something like Y2495ZKM55ubIOiLjyxtYWlsPXNlbmdAeGluZG9uZ3lhbmcuY29t this?

hehe

any clue?

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Ubuntu thunderbird Edit question
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seng
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Revision history for this message
marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#1

Have you already tried the Thunderbird menu View -> Character Encoding...

Hope this helps

Revision history for this message
Lee Braiden (lee-braiden) said : 		#2

The LDIF standard doesn't allow direct use of unicode, even if the file itself might be encoded that way on your machine. The strings that don't fit into a standard charset (probably ASCII) are being encoded as Base64:

http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200504/msg00350.html
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2849.txt

That's fine; it's supposed to do that :)

Revision history for this message
seng (hor-seng) said : 		#3

alright thanks again for fast response. I appreciate it.

Right after I wrote this message I tried again and then like a miracle
thunderbird recognizes the characters in csv automatically.
Im so happy.
My 400 and so contacts from outlook being finally imported to thunderbird addressbook with chinese characters wuuuu!

Maybe I should write a How to huh?
The thing is with Outlook it has more categories (way more than Thunderbird)
Some of this categories has infos which I didnt transfer to Thunderbird cause Thunderbird addressbook
is very limited.

Anyways I am happy.
 PS: I love that Walnut theme for firefox and thunderbird so much. Too bad they dont have that theme for ubuntu desktop.

seng