121210 - Implement text highlight feature to apply background color to selected text (inline css <span style="background-color:xxx">) / Page background color picker is misplaced (edit)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 318600

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Hakon]

There should be a way to use highlighting colours - like <span
style="background-color:#">
I sometimes get it wrong and think that the colour selector for body bgcolor in
the toolbar would mean paragraph bgcolor.

Comment 1

[Kathleen :Brade]

This sounds like a duplicate bug to me.
Reassign to myself to track down.

My understanding of this bug is that the color pickers on the toolbar should be
for foreground and background of text (and not necessarily the whole message). 
Does that sound correct?

Comment 2

[Hakon]

Correct! Or otherwise there could be 3 buttons. After all, body background is
likely to change only once per message.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

Bug 97840 suggests a solution: turn the button for the page background color 
into a button for text background color when you select text.

Comment 4

[Charles Manske]

There is a new "block background" icon on the toolbar that operates when you 
set the Composer pref to us CSS for attributes. That fulfills this request, so I 
think you should mark this fixed.

Comment 5

[Kathleen :Brade]

As Charley points out, you can enable "highlighting icon" (next to color chips)
by enabling CSS and using that.

The issue of confusion with color chips/icons is bug 97840.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 97840 ***

Comment 6

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

verified dup.

Comment 7

[Hakon]

That button only appears in the "Composer" but not when composing a message from
within MailNews, even if CSS is enabled.

Comment 8

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

Since reporter indicated component MailNews, I agree with its reopening.
The bug should then be understood as "enable CSS composition and text highlight
feature in mail composition".

Comment 9

[Blu3]

Mail/News should be able to show HTML source for editing just like Composer.  If
the Composer features were combined with the m/n composer, everything would be
available.

Comment 10

[Vidar Haarr (not reading bugmail)]

Dupe of bug 22053 ?

Comment 11

[Kathleen :Brade]

-->mailnews with correct summary
(I don't think that this is a duplicate of bug 22053 since that is about text
size and this is about text highlight color but it may be a duplicate of some
other bug.)

Comment 12

[Kathleen :Brade]

cc Jennifer to find out if there is any interest in having this functionality
available to users in mail compose

Comment 13

[Blu3]

For mail?  Most definitely.  Currently I have to jury-rig a template to use a
CSS set and it's pretty touchy about how many bytes into the template I put the
style import.

Comment 14

[Nicolas Miceli]

About the text highlighting, (don't know if it helps at all, else sorry for the
spam) but using a simple tag like:

<font style="background:yellow; color:black"> Blah blah blah </font>

would do the job. Currently it's the way I send mails with highlighted text, but
you have to do it manually (Insert > HTML). I agree with the proposed solution
in comment #2.

Comment 15

[piers]

*** Bug 205907 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 278498 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

SM bug 97840 describes same/similar problem for HTML Editor aka "Composer" component of SeaMonkey.

Comment 19

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Right, we need to start consolidating all the bugs about this somewhere, somehow, and bug 318600 looks better than this to me.

Comment 20

[Rainer Bielefeld]

Sorry, my misunderstanding: 
"Bug 318600 - Need text highlight feature to apply background color to selected text (inline css <span style="background-color:xxx">) / Page background color picker is misplaced" seems to be for a separate fix in SeaMonkey?

Comment 21

[Rainer Bielefeld]

(In reply to Rainer Bielefeld from comment #20)
No, both "Mailnews core.

Comment 22

[rsx11m]

SeaMonkey is bug 489067 and may be needed for application-specific UI work once bug 318600 provides a backend. I'm in favor of duping this bug here against 318600 which has more people CCed.

Comment 23

[Mr.DancingEmail2]

Wow! 18 years and still not fixed!
@Kathleen :Brade wrote this: "My understanding of this bug is that the color pickers on the toolbar should be
for foreground and background of text (and not necessarily the whole message).
Does that sound correct?" Yes, but it does not work. Highlighting text and choosing a new foreground color correctly changes only the color of the highlighted text. However, highlighting text and choosing a new background color still incorrectly highlights the whole message. Please please oh please fix it!

Comment 24

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #22)

SeaMonkey is bug 489067 and may be needed for application-specific UI work
once bug 318600 provides a backend. I'm in favor of duping this bug here
against 318600 which has more people CCed.

+1. There is zero difference between this bug and bug 318600, so there's zero reason to keep this open as it will just distract. We don't need more than two bugs for this at this time.