344119 - Line wrapping of quoted text does not work properly for some messages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 196033

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Daniel Huber]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Build Identifier: 1.5.0.4 (20060516)

When I reply to a message, the quoted text is not correctly wrapped to the window width.  This only happens for some messages, and I have been unable to determine what is the cause.

For example, if I have a message like:

Daniel,

I have an external hard drive that I work on, but I do not have writing rights when I connect it to the lab machines.  Can this be fixed?

-Eujern

Then when I reply to the message, I would expect to get something like

Eujern Lim wrote:
> Daniel,
> 
> I have an external hard drive that I work on, but I do not have writing 
> rights when I connect it to the lab machines.  Can this be fixed?
> 
> -Eujern
> 
> 

But instead, I get

Eujern Lim wrote:
> Daniel,
> 
> I have an external hard drive that I work on, but I do not have writing rights when I connect it to the lab machines.  Can this be fixed?
> 
> -Eujern
> 
> 

The result is all the quoted text for each paragraph is on one line and runs off the side of the screen.  This makes it very difficult for people who want to intersperse there reply with the quoted text.



Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
This problem happens only on some messages.  But it happens reliably with these messages.

1. In thunderbird, select File->open saved message and open the message that is located at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dhuber/files/thunderbird_bug/Installing%20VMPlayer%20in%20Lab.eml

2. Press the Reply button.

Actual Results:  
  In the new compose window, the body of the quoted message will be all on one line

Expected Results:  
The body of the quoted message should appear on multiple lines

There is a screenshot at:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dhuber/files/thunderbird_bug/reply_screenshot.png

that shows the incorrect wrapping behavior for this message.

I was also able to reproduce the bug on Thunderbird for Linux.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 196033 ***

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Reporter sent me email:
> [...] I was hoping you could explain why you feel that this is a 
> duplicate bug to 196033.  Perhaps I was not clear in my original 
> report.  The automatic wrapping of quoted text in replies works 
> correctly in 99% of cases, including situations where the original 
> message had long lines of text in it.  Only rarely does the automatic 
> wrapping fail to do any wrapping at all.
> 
> As far as I can tell, bug 196033 is proposing a workaround to the fact 
> that "long lines are quoted as long lines".  Now, it is true that my bug 
> is about the same problem in that long lines are quoted as long lines.  
> However, since most of the email I receive that has long lines is 
> correctly quoted in the reply, I think that bug 196033 may be no longer 
> relevant.  Perhaps some code changes in the past 3 years have made that 
> bug obsolete.


The "long lines" in question are the lines in the source of the message, not in the rendering of it.  It is also important to be aware of "format=flowed", 
which is a way of transmitting plain-text messages that allows the message text to reflow to the window size.  Quoting an f=f message, even one with long lines in the source, does in fact get wrapped more-or-less 'correctly' in a quote -- that is, the lines are wrapped at the 72-character column.  (I believe, but I'm not checking this at the moment, that one bug here is that it's always wrapped to 72, rather than to whatever your wrap column is set to.)  You can check if a message is f=f by looking at the Content-Type header line in the message 
source.

Long source lines that don't get wrapped when quoted include those within <pre> blocks in HTML messages, and those in non-f=f plain text messages.  Check the message that you're encountering the problem with and see if it matches one of these criteria.  If not, either save the message as a .EML file and attach it 
to this bug, or (if the material is too sensitive for a public forum) forward a copy of it to me -- as an attachment, not inline -- and I'll investigate further.

Comment 3

[Daniel Huber]

Mike is correct.  This bug is a duplicate of bug 196033.  However, some people may stumble upon this bug and its comments, so I will summarize what I have learned about Thunderbird's line wrapping functionality (since there is no manual that explains this stuff).

If a message is format=flowed (specified in the content-type header), long lines in the quoted message in the reply will be wrapped.

If the message is plain text (not format=flowed), then long lines will not be wrapped, and this is not a bug.

If a user wants long lines in a quoted plain text message to be wrapped, there is a little-known command in the edit menu of the compose menu called "rewrap" that will do a reasonable job at wrapping the long lines.  If you select a portion of the message, then the rewrap command will just rewrap the selection, though it does not (currently) work as well as whole message rewrapping.

Comment 4

[Chad Lake]

(In reply to comment #3)
> 
> If a user wants long lines in a quoted plain text message to be wrapped, there
> is a little-known command in the edit menu of the compose menu called "rewrap"
> that will do a reasonable job at wrapping the long lines.  If you select a
> portion of the message, then the rewrap command will just rewrap the selection,
> though it does not (currently) work as well as whole message rewrapping.
> 

What would be a nice feature extension, is that if you selected text and selected "rewrap" from the edit menu, that it would recognize the line(s) as quotes and quote them accordingly.  As it exists, if you rewrap then you get the first line as a quote, and all subsequent lines as non-quotes (moving text from quote-context to non-quote-context). 



-c

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #4)
> As it exists, if you rewrap [a selection of quoted lines] then you get
> the first line as a quote, and all subsequent lines as non-quotes (moving
> text from quote-context to non-quote-context). 

Yeah, that's a known problem; see bug 187997.  The workaround is, when you select the quoted lines, include a non-quoted line (preferably blank) immediately below the quote in the selection.