Seeing a message about bitmaps for fonts confuses me a bit.
I was under the impression that the "Character-Set" we've been
discussing is a specification of how to map of a purportedly-textual
bytestream into a linear arrangement of instances from some particular
set of abstract "letters" (an alphabet?). Since most standards in this
area define both that set of letters, and an encoding for the data
stream, we've been (usefully) confusing the two things. At some level
of detail, knowing what letters we have, and their sequence, is as far
as we can go in sending "text".
There are also the issues of: Given this text in this alphabet, what
font do I use to display this text to the user?, and how do I format
lines?, and so forth. These are issues addressed by the design of the
UA and the Content-Type of the document being transmitted. Typically,
each UA implements a default document format, which is used when the
default Content-Type of "text" is the content-type of the message. Some
do interesting things with fonts, others break lines in nice ways, etc.
Of course, if the content-type of the message is specified *in* the
message, one hopes that information about which fonts to use, etc, would
be part of that document format, and not up to the UA.
I suppose it might be nice to set up network servers, so that one could
FTP default fonts for various alphabets. But is this really a mail
issue?
Bill