Closed Bug 1754150 Opened 3 years ago Closed 3 years ago

[Task Description] Copy-paste from other applications into task description is erratic: text often gets weird "decorations" around it, and breaks synchronization

Categories

(Calendar :: Dialogs, defect)

Product:
Calendar
Component:
Dialogs
Version:
Thunderbird 91
Platform:
x86_64
Linux
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: mozilla, Unassigned)

Details

Attachments

(1 file)

Semantic formatting pastes as intended
265.79 KB, image/png
Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0

Steps to reproduce:

Copy-pasted text from another application (Firefox, konsole, ...) into task description

Actual results:

On occasion text acquires weird "decorations". Sometimes it's just strange colors and fonts, but sometimes its more intrusive such as a frame around the text, which interferes with further editing.
When saving changes, closing edit window and opening it again, usually the weird fonts and colors go away, but the frames stay.

Expected results:

The same thing as would have happened if I typed the text on the keyboard: just the text should have shown up, and nothing else!

OS: Unspecified → Linux
Hardware: Unspecified → x86_64

I've now found one of my task descriptions which has these distracting "decorations".
In the case of this description, the decorations show up only in edit, but show up every time when going to edit (i.e. don't disappear after closing / re-opening).

However, copy-pasting the entire description to a new task doesn't export the problem to that new task, so it's pointless to quote it here.

Decorations involve:

  • italics after slashes (in a command to cd into a directory)
  • URLs are partly colorized (but not clickable, so this is utterly pointless)

One example where the framing happens, is when you copy-paste parts of the bug search result list from bugzilla into a task description.

"On occasion..."

As stated, please post a reproduction that is reliably 100% reproducible. That includes stating what you are pasting and where exactly you are pasting it from.

This is necessary for bugs to be fixed.

As mentioned elsewhere, please follow https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/reproduction_steps/ (all parts of it) when posting bugs.

CLOSEME 2022-03-01 as INVALID, if there is no clear reproduction in the format as mentioned in the last comment.

Another weird thing: this happens in a shared calendar (davical) as well. Weird framing is not shown (fortunately) when I edit the task description in an old thunderbird (78.14.0)

However, it still shows up when I then go back to my new thunderbird (91.5) and attempt to edit the task.
What's more, my changes done in the old thunderbird do not show up in my new thunderbird's edit view, but they do show up in its preview.

Summary: [Task Description] Copy-paste from other applications into task description is erratic: text often gets weird "decorations" around it → [Task Description] Copy-paste from other applications into task description is erratic: text often gets weird "decorations" around it, and breaks synchronization

When I now do an edit on the new thunderbird, I can do so, and save it without any warning that there is/was a conflicting change.

The new edit now does indeed show up on the old thunderbird.

=> so now this whole disaster has morphed from "just" a presentation issue into a potential data loss issue! More reason to roll this back!
Or at least de-activate it on shared / shareable calendars.

Another data point where decorations happen: when copy-pasting from a mail message (from within thunderbird itself), any URLs and email addresses are colorized. Interestingly, URL links (http) are not clickable, but E-Mail addresses are: clicking them opens a compose window to that person.

Describing what happened to you once is not helpful. We need a reliable reproduction. This should be easy in this case, because it's probably related to what you paste. Without reliable reproduction, we cannot do anything.

As said before, please follow https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/reproduction_steps/ (all parts of it) when posting bugs. If you are not able to, I will have to close your bugs as INVALID.

I just found one reproducible copy-paste that behaves funny: on this very page, select the text [Task Description] from the title of this bug report. And paste it into a task description. The pasted text will show up much bigger than the rest of the text. Tried it twice, it happened each time.

Noting that, there has been an ESR release packaged at the beginning of April. That was long after the original bug #1745602, and also after my followups #1754148, #1754150 and #1754162 (which I created following the advice in comment 17).
But none of them look fixed. However, from reading #1745602 I figure out that the change which caused all this was integration of some kind of web editor into thunderbird. So theoretically, it should have been easy to back out, at least for the long-term supported releases, whose users expect stability.

select the text [Task Description] from the title of this bug report. And paste it into a task description. The pasted text will show up much bigger

That is completely correct behavior. The title of this bug report is a <h1> element. BugZilla uses CSS to style it to be a little smaller, but it's still bigger than the rest of the text. Semantically, it's a "top-most level heading".

When you paste it, we intentionally do not keep the CSS styles (because that would lead to all kinds of other mess), but we keep the semantical structure of the document you paste. We keep headings, bullet points, paragraphs etc.. Given that this is a highest order heading, we retain that information. It's rendered in the normal HTML way. It is the title of the page, and we render it as the title of the page.

This works exactly as intended. Maybe not as you want or expect, of course you may disagree with the decisions, but it works correctly.

Tip: If you want to paste only the text, press Shift-Ctrl-V. This pastes only the text and no formatting.

As you can see from the screenshot, we correctly copied the fact that one part is a the page title, therefore big. Other parts are italics also paste correctly.

Likewise, bulleted lists and paragraphs paste correctly.

just the text should have shown up, and nothing else

This is what Shift-Ctrl-V does.

Works as intended. WONTFIX

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 3 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX

This is what Shift-Ctrl-V does.

That just "pastes" a random sequence of digits, not the text I selected.

I just tried and it works for me, on Linux, copying from Firefox (bugzilla) and pasting into Thunderbird new Task

Maybe not as you want or expect

Glad that you understand that this is not what I want. So, would it be possible to have a about:config option with which people who don't want this "feature"set can switch it off, and get back to 78.14 behavior? Thanks

Like I said: Just use Shift-Ctrl-V, if you don't want the formatting. See "Edit" menu in the standard email editor.

So the solution would be to use Shift-Ctrl-V to paste, and Shift-Enter to insert a newline. But why can't the "old" buttons and keys continue to work as they used to (and like they still do everywhere else, including other areas of thunderbird)? Muscle memory , etc.

And besides, even Shift-Ctrl-V doesn't quite work as expected.

And if some people actually want the new bizarre behaviors, why can't we have a config setting that allows to chose?

It's not bizarre to keep semantic formatting like bulleted lists. The default email composer does the same.
If you want plaintext paste, you can do it with Shift-Ctrl-V.

Please stop beating me, here and elsewhere. Thank you.

(In reply to Ben Bucksch (:BenB) from comment #20)

It's not bizarre to keep semantic formatting like bulleted lists. The default email composer does the same.

Actually, in email composer, paste works right. Email composer seems to have none of those bizarre issues, except for problem B of bug #1767392.

If you want plaintext paste, you can do it with Shift-Ctrl-V.

Formerly, I could just use the mouse. I still can everywhere else.

Please stop beating me, here and elsewhere. Thank you.

Sorry for having reported these editor issues as multiple bugs, but I understood that was what you actually preferred?

Still an issue in 115.7.0

New thing in 115.7.0:
when copy-pasting from konsole into task description, copy-pasted text is shown bigger than what was entered using keyboard so far.
However, typing stuff after this copy-paste now uses the larger characters.
Saving and re-opening shows everything with a same size again.

However, copy-pasting from other programs (such as firefox) leads to weird colors and other artifacts which stay after saving & reopening

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