1357080 - Quotation markup lost in clipboard with plain text editor

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Sven Greiner]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170330221232

Steps to reproduce:

- Compose a mail via the plain text editor
- Write some text
- "Paste as quotation" some text
- Cut all text and paste it again

This is often done to re-order the contents of a mail, a quite common use case.


Actual results:

The quotation is not recognized anymore as a quotation. Sending as plain text with f=f inserts a leading space before the ">". (See also bug 1356012)


Expected results:

The text should be pasted with the same format as it was cut/copied, i.e. the quote should be recognized as a quote and rendered in blue.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Simpler STR:

In a plaintext reply, or in a plaintext composition where "Paste As Quotation" was used, cut any quoted line and paste it again. It loses its "quote-ness", that is, its colour and the fact that no space stuffing of the > would have taken place.

This is well known and well documented here:
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c697e756f738ce37abc56f31bfbc48f55625d617/dom/base/nsDocumentEncoder.cpp#1356
(I wrote that comment, in fact).

In a nutshell: When copy/pasting from a plain text composition, you have the choice between two evils:
1) Lose white-space
2) Lose formatting (colour, style, quote-ness, etc.)

For TB we chose the latter, FF chose the former.

Sadly the Core::Serializers module is unowned and no work is done there by Mozilla core staff.