1651893 - In the Paragraph Format dropdown list containing "Body Text" and "Paragraph" and others, it is impossible to keep "Body Text" beyond the first paragraph of the message, as it defaults to "Paragraph" for all subsequent paragraphs.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Noel Hart]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

I tried to type in a new email/message in the Message Compose Window. Below the "From", "To", and "Subject" there is a dropdown list (I think that is the term for it) for Paragraph Format, which contains the words "Body Text", "Paragraph", "Heading 1", "Heading 2" and others. I selected "Body Text" and started to type in several paragraphs of the message, hitting the "Enter" key (on the keyboard) as I usually do to start new paragraphs.

Actual results:

As mentioned, I selected "Body Text" from the Paragraph Format dropdown list. I then started to type several paragraphs of a message, hitting the "Enter" key after each paragraph. I found that "Body Text" was in effect for the first paragraph, but after that the Paragraph Format reverted to "Paragraph" for subsequent paragraphs of the message. The same thing happened when I selected "Heading 1" or "Heading 2", etc., at the start of a message.

Expected results:

I had expected to be able to set a particular Paragraph Format (e.g. "Body Text", "Paragraph", "Heading 1", "Heading 2", ...., "Address", "Preformat" as the case may be) at the start of a message, and have it remain the same for all subsequent paragraphs of the message. Pressing the "Enter" key should not change the Paragraph Format.

Comment 1

[Peter Lairo]

What's your setting under: Settings / Composition / HTML Style / [ ] Use Paragraph format instead of Body Text by default ?

just curious, as IMO it shouldn't make a difference, since if the user selects "Body Text" in the compose window, it should almost never revert to paragraph (only in very rare circumstance, none of which I can't think right now).

OT: I seriously disagree that "Use Paragraph format" is the default, UNLESS they change the default paragraph spacing to ZERO (i.e. identical to "Body Text", or they make the paragraph spacing configurable via UI (like in LibreOffice).

Comment 2

[Peter Lairo]

FYI: I just filed bug 1861282, which addresses a very related issue.

Comment 3

[hent]

This has driven me nuts for a while so I decided to join Bugzilla :)

What's your setting under: Settings / Composition / HTML Style / [ ] Use Paragraph format instead of Body Text by default ?

Unchecking this actually solved the problem for me. However, I am doubtful that the behaviour I recorded here before unchecking it can be wanted by anyone:

<-- https://i.makeagif.com/media/7-17-2024/Hlycbk.gif (not shown here)

Description:

1. Answering to a conversation (not shown) which has non-default paragraph setting in the second last message (!). The first word of the answer is already written, "Monsieur," and all lines down to the header of the last message have been selected and set to "Body text".
2. The cursor moves along the empty lines to demonstrate that they are all set to "Body text".
3. The moment I press enter, not only does the setting jump back to "Paragraph", it also changes the setting for the first word!
4. I change the style back to "Body text" but this is reverted immediately after pressing enter again.

Usability fail, why?

Even when someone has

[x] Use Paragraph format instead of Body Text by default
activated,

1. I would expect the setting to be using the paragraph style of the last message, not the one of the last-best with non-default settings. This is counter-intuitive.
2. It seems to be impossible to override this setting and gives the impression of bad software.

Comment 4

[hent]

P.S.: Thunderbird 115.12.2