305486 - prettyprinting of superscripts leads to information loss in copy/paste

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 290274

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Günter Rote]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050718 Debian/1.7.8-1sarge1
Build Identifier: Thunderbird:version 1.0.2 (20050331)

Text like "1.234*10^5" in a message is rendered with a superscipt 5 replacing
the "^" sign when reading the mail. When copying and pasting this text to a new
message, it will appear as "1.234*105".

This problem does not apply to *highlighting* and _underscoring_ and to
emoticons ;.-)
Also, when including a copy of the message text in a "Reply"-message, everything
is fine.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. sent a message containing "10^12" to yourself
2. read the received message (or the stored message in the Sent folder)
3. mark the resulting text, which appears as "10 superscript 12", with the mouse
4. copy the text (Ctrl-C)
5. Write a new message (or something in another application)
6. paste the copied text (Ctrl-V)

Actual Results:  
The pasted text appears as "1012"

Expected Results:  
The pasted text should appear as "10^12"

The bug persists when copy-pasting with the middle mouse button on unix.

A somewhat tedious workaround is to open a message for REPLYing, and copy
the text from there, removing the "> " indentations afterward.

It would be easier if one could switch off prettyprinting.

The bug is particularly annoying for copying long stretches of mathematical
text, with expressions like n^2 etc.

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

Related to/dupe of bug 290274?

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Definitely a dupe.

The workaround is to turn off graphic display of emoticons.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 290274 ***