1348804 - Use of the delete key messes up paragraphing

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[najoll]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170316213829

Steps to reproduce:

(1) Created a new blank email.
(2) Pressed the <tab> key. Entered the text, 'Test.' Pressed return.
(3) On the newline, pressed <tab> again.
(4) Pressed the <delete> key.
(5) Pressed <tab> again. 


Actual results:

(I) At stage 4, the cared moved back approximately - perhaps exactly - the space of a single character.
(II) At stage 5, the caret occupied a position that was not horizontally aligned with the tab position in stage 2.


Expected results:

(I) At stage 4, the caret should have moved to the start of the line.
(II) At stage 5, the caret should have occupied a position that was horizontally aligned with the tab position in stage 2.

In short: the paragraphing is messed up, in that one can delete tabs and, after one has done that, tabs no longer line up. These problems mean that creating a professional-looking e-mail is very hard.

(PS: The bug guidelines ask me to use Thunderbird Nightly. But I can't keep a version of Nightly around to test on, or install it every time I need to test bugs. For I am not a Thunderbird developer, though I begin to feel I will have to become one if I am to get various bugs fixed!)

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Looks like the tab key inserts non-breaking spaces. Tabs are not a concept flowing HTML text. They do appear to work when you use "Preformat" instead of "Paragraph".

Comment 2

[najoll]

Jorg, thank you for the response.

It seems to me that marking this bug report 'invalid' is a mistake. Here's why. Ceteris paribus counter-intuitive behaviour is bad and this tab behaviour is counter-intuitive. Tabs should be tabs, especially since, when they are not - i.e., at present - one is apt to end up with raggedy i.e. misaligned text. You tell me that tabs are tabs - so to speak - so long as one uses 'preformat'. That's something. How though - and not for the first time of asking, I believe - to set 'preformat' as the default?