821337 - line wrapping in text mails is not wysiwyg

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Darko Veberic]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/12.10 Chromium/22.0.1229.94 Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4

Steps to reproduce:

message is composed in text mode and let's have quite a long text, ie spanning several lines. if some editing is done, deleting characters, adding words at the end of the existing lines, while the text still looks correctly wrapped during the editing, the lines become broken totally differently in the resulting mail received by the addressee. bottom line: line wrapping in compose window is not wysiwyg, the final email usually looks quite different...



Actual results:

examples:

write long mail, spanning several lines, without any editing. in the compose widow it will get neatly broken at 70 char limit. the resulting mail is one long line (in mail clients then broken depending on the reading window size).

write long mail, do some editing, removing chars, especially at the border of the 70 char limit of compose window. the resulting email is composed of several long lines, but broken at random places, absolutely not resembling the input mail, ie not wysiwyg.


Expected results:

either all lines are concatenated into one single line (default when no post-typing editing is done), single empty line in input effectively becomes the breaking point. like latex.

make visual distinction between non-\n wrapping breaks at 70 char and real \n breaks when user presses <return>.

add "pi" button which makes spaces and \n visible like in word processors...?

something else?

in any case the current plain-text compose is somewhere in the limbo zone between paragraph oriented editing and full user control of breaking. imho decision has to be made...