1535557 - Thunderbird doesn't indent continuation lines for bullet list when operating in plaintext

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Markus]

Attachment: mail.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.121 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I am writing an e-mail in plaintext format and would like to create a list.

Example:

• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

Actual results:

The list is created normally, but the presentation is not so nice. The list is not really recognizable as a list and hard to read.

Expected results:

ClawsMail formats the list much better. In the attachment a screenshot which illustrates this. I would appreciate it if Thunderbird would do the same.

Comment 1

[Patrick Albrecht]

user means Indentation

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Patrick Albrecht from comment #1)

user means Indentation

good observation!

Which leads to ... Thunderbird does not do bullet lists at all in plaintext, let alone indentation. And I doubt that clawsmail is operating in plaintext in your example. Thunderbird will do this in html mode by holding shift key when you click on comppose, or change your account settings to html https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configuration-options-accounts#w_composition-addressing-panel You will know whether you are in html mode if the toolbar is present as shown in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sending-and-receiving-messages-thunderbird#w_the-basics Additional info at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1110272

Or perhaps you have compose in HTML mode already, but you are expecting Thunderbird to change asterisks to bullets?

Comment 3

[Markus]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #2)

And I doubt that clawsmail is operating in plaintext in your example.

ClawsMail can only plaintext. See:

https://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#Does_Claws_Mail_allow_me_to_write_HTML_styled_messages.3F

Thunderbird will do this in html mode

I know. My feature request is that this should also work in plaintext mode.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

hmm, then ClawsMail is somehow faking it.

Can you email me such a message or better yet attach the source of such an email (Attach File) to the bug report?

Comment 5

[Markus]

Attachment: test_message.eml

Comment 6

[Markus]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #4)

Can you email me such a message or better yet attach the source of such an email (Attach File) to the bug report?

I attached an e-mail.

• Written in Claws-Mail
• Received and stored with Thunderbird

ClawsMail has the "better" Plaintext Editor. I wish the write/editor of Thunderbird could do that too, it's not about more than that...

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

The results may look nice, but the resulting encoding (below [1]), hard wrapped with CR-LF, is horrible. I'm not sure we would want to do this when we have an editor mode (non plain text of course) which will already do it.

aid, it sounds like this is along the lines of the following

• Bug 360904 - Support creating formatted message as text/enriched
• Bug 639264 - Composing a plain-text mail should offer appropriate formatting (bullets, preformatted)
  There may be other example bug reports.

[1] testcase
Hi I'm a Test.

• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam
  nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam
  erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores
  et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est
  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam

That s

Comment 8

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I don't quite understand the issue. Surely in a TB plaintext message compose window you can type

* this is a list
  second line
* here comes another time
  with a second line

I tried that and it works. Of course the * is not recognised as bullet with automatic indentation. I'd have to install Claws to see how that works.

Comment 9

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

OK, installed it, yes, if the preceding line starts with a *, the next line is indented.

Comment 10

[Markus]

(In reply to Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2) from comment #9)

OK, installed it, yes, if the preceding line starts with a *, the next line is indented.

It's more than that. You have indented "second line" and "with a second line" in your example by hand. With small enumerations that are not so long it works well. However, if you have several sentences in one bullet point, this will be time-consuming. Especially if you change a sentence or delete some words and the manual indenting does not fit anymore. When writing you are then constantly correcting, so that it looks like a enumeration again.