443634 - Too much page space used by printing attachment list and inline previews [meta]

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Printing, enhancement)

Description

[Paolo Loggia]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: 20080421

When you print a message with more than 2 attachments, at least half a page (on a A4 page) is needed only for the list of attachments.
Each attachment is listed with name and the value of header message fields "content-type" and "content-encoding", surrounded by fancy graphics.
And this is not enough, there is a bold line between each attachment.

This may be very nice, but hardly acceptable.

A simple table list of attachments should suffice.

Please, let's save trees!

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.get a message with more than 2 attachments
2.print the message (you may use the preview)

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

Cross-referencing bug 75308 for Mozilla Suite, no action there though. The current behavior was (re-)introduced by bug 134492, because of Netscape-4.x parity, but also given that some users considered it a necessity.

Personally, I would agree that the attachment boxes in the current form are
using up quite a bit of space and may not be necessary for a user. One may
argue that the user can always limit the printing range to omit additional
pages, which however is an inconvenient step to be remembered every time.

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

Confirming as enhancement request, the attachment boxes could be redesigned to require less space and still provide the information needed. Also, an option could be introduced to omit those entirely if the user doesn't want them.

Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421), Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.2pre) Gecko/2008071701 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I very much agree with the goal of this bug, but in its current shape, this bug isn't actionable, as the next steps / expected results are
- missing from current summary (Too much page space used by printing attachment list)
- missing / unclear in description
- or hidden in comments (comment 2: implement option to omit attachment list entirely).

I have filed bug 544984 which has more details about specific layout improvements that will ultimately make a nice and simple list of attachments as desired in comment 0.

I suggest
-> duplicate this bug against more detailed bug 544984
-> open a new followup bug for the idea of comment 2: implement option to omit attachment files list when printing (add checkbox option "Print attachments list" to: Page setup > format & options > -options-)

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I suggest
> -> duplicate this bug against more detailed bug 544984

Actually, this bug has turned out to be useful as a meta bug, to which we can add various dependent bugs that somehow address this problem.

> -> open a new followup bug for the idea of comment 2: implement option to omit
> attachment files list when printing (add checkbox option "Print attachments
> list" to: Page setup > format & options > -options-)

-> Bug 549139

Comment 5

[charan]

Found this bug in Build6

Comment 6

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Bug 544984 condenses things quite a bit (not quite as much as suggested in this bug, though), so maybe this is WONTFIX now? Or do people still think this is necessary/good to have?

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks Jim.
Thomas D had a handle on this, so we might let him deal with this on his return

Comment 8

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Hmm, I may have meant to post comment 6 in bug 540571. Still, it'd probably be good to decide what should be done here, if anything.

Comment 9

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I'd rather keep this as a meta bug to connect the various ends that we're working on to save trees.

To that end, I've just added this related bug to the dependencies:

Bug 387237 - Implement option to print email without inline attachments (preview of images, html etc.): needs checkbox in Page Setup, Format & Options

Comment 10

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Removing myslef on all the bugs I'm cced on. Please NI me if you need something on MailNews Core bugs from me.