232750 - display soft/hard wraps in plain text editor + add ¶ pilcrow toolbar button to toggle display on/off

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[John Malmberg]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; OpenVMS AlphaServer_DS10_617_MHz; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030827

Mozilla soft wraps lines that are too long when composing in plain text.

Since Mozilla is sending in Format-Flowed that can not currently be disabled,
this results in what the composer sees will not be what the receiver sees.

Mozilla should provide a way to make these soft line wraps visible to the
composer when the resulting message is going to be sent format flowed.

Otherwise the sender may not realize that
their line
breaks are not where they expect them to
be.

This bug is related to 86607, provide an option to disable format flowed.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Not related, but a good idea anyways. confirming.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I think it would be better to show the hard wraps, actually -- use the Pilcrow 
mark [¶] and show it (ideally in color different from text, preferably a muted 
one), wherever the user types a hard return.  

That way, a (potentially distracting) display item pops up in only two places: 
(1) at the end of paragraphs, and (2) when the user does something to make the 
text flow *more* difficult to get right -- by typing a hard return in the middle 
of a sentence -- rather than when she does the right thing and just keeps on 
typing.

Comment 3

[John Malmberg]

Showing the hard wraps with a special character symbol seems like a good solution.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 259365 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Nelson Benítez]

I don't know if mine is another problem, but mine is that composing window
cheats me, it shows me a good formated message (all wrapped at 76 lines for
example) and I send it and when viewed in my own mailreader or other mailreaders
or online mail archives the message is clumsy wrapped.

A clean solution to this is that the composing editor instead of insert soft
wraps just insert normal newlines when reaches wrap limit (76 lines). Or instead
it could just convert all soft wraps to normal newlines just before send the
message. I've tried that and my message now shows in other places the same as in
my editor window.

Comment 6

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #5)
> I don't know if mine is another problem, but mine is that composing window
> cheats me, it shows me a good formated message (all wrapped at 76 lines for
> example) and I send it and when viewed in my own mailreader or other
> mailreaders or online mail archives the message is clumsy wrapped.

You are seeing the effects of TB using format=flowed to send mail.  If you let 
the program wrap sometimes and hit <enter> sometimes at the wrap point, then the 
wrapping of the text is going to look wrong.  This situation would be helped by 
implementing the feature requested in this bug, which would help keep people 
from typing <enter> when it wasn't necessary.


> it could just convert all soft wraps to normal newlines just before send the
> message. 

If you turn off f=f, that's the effect you will get.  See bug 168420 for 
information about f=f, including the informative FAQ attached to that bug.

Comment 7

[Nelson Benítez]

Thanks Mike, the faq[1] is pretty good and I was able to disable flowed format
with the following in user.js:
user_pref("mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support", true);
user_pref("mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed", false);

I think the percentage of people that will see my messages in display less than
76  chars is minuscule compare to people that will see it in wider screens with
flowed support enabled (all firefox users) where my mails look like this[2]. 

Imho flowed mode only benefits a minority of small displays and has the
disadvantage that text is  easier to read in a fixed width of 76 ch. for example
than occuping all the width available in a wide display. 

Also I don't think that me putting newlines in right places could fix the effect
in [2], and if that were the case I don't see instructing the user how to put
newlines is a way to go.

Please don't take this as a rant, it's just that I wanted to put here my
thoughts after reading the flowed mode faq[1]. 

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=134270
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2005-September/msg00077.html

Comment 8

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> Imho flowed mode only

f=f or not is not the subject of this bug, but merely the composer displaying
soft vs. hard wraps.

Comment 10

[chrizilla]

Regarding above exchange about whether to display soft wraps (comment #0) or hard wraps (comment #2):

I suggest to display both:

• soft wrap = space + CRLF
• hard wrap = CRLF

This obviously also needs a control to toggle display on/off.
Duplicate bug 821337 makes a good suggestion:

add "pi" button which makes spaces and \n visible like in word processors

A pilcrow ¶ toolbar button could toggle on/off display of non-printing control characters.
Users of word processors and advanced text editors are already familiar with this button.

Comment 11

[chrizilla]

Attachment: display soft+hard wraps.png

original image source: https://cpbotha.net/2016/09/27/thunderbird-support-of-rfc-3676-formatflowed-is-half-broken
image content: Suggestion for displaying soft and hard wraps. In this image only spaces immediately preceding a linebreak are highlighted.

Comment 12

[chrizilla]

Attachment: control chars display in LibreOffice.gif

image type: animated GIF
image content: display of control characters in LibreOffice

Comment 13

[chrizilla]

Attachment: control chars display in Notepad++.png

image content: display of control characters in Notepad++.
Spaces are barely visible. Vertical delimiter after 72nd character – could be useful in Thunderbird, too.