528820 - Word wrapping and flowed format issues

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Skippy le Grand Gourou]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009090905 Fedora/3.0.14-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.14
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.23 (20090825)

There seems to be a regression on the word wrapper. 



Apologies if this is a duplicate, couldn't find relevant recent results.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set text messages width to a fixed amount of characters, from Edit > Preferences > Redaction > General > "Format text messages in lines of XXX characters" [NB : Text may differ a bit since I'm using the French translation].
2. Write a message with enough words to make several lines regarding to the value you have set in 1.
3. Send message to yourself.
4. Read message.
Actual Results:  
While the message is correctly displayed in the writing box, when you receive it it is not wrapped.

Expected Results:  
The received message should have the same appearance that the one in the writing box, that is, should be wrapped in lines of at most XXX characters as defined in 1.

This issue concerns TB 2.0.0.23 in Fedora 10, but TB 2.0.0.22 in Arch Linux works fine, hence the "regression ?" in the title.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

and is 2.0.0.23 on arch Linux behaving the same way ?

Comment 2

[Skippy le Grand Gourou]

(In reply to comment #1)
> and is 2.0.0.23 on arch Linux behaving the same way ?

Actually I was reticent to update my Arch Linux install for many reasons, otherwise I would have filed the report in a more relevant manner… Anyway, as TB does not seem to have any dependency, I eventually upgraded to 2.0.0.23. And guess what ? Word wrapping works fine…

So either it is a Fedora related issue, or there is something wrong in my config file (but a quick look did not give me any hint).

Unfortunately currently I don't have any time to investigate, so let's let this report hibernate until I or someone else take it back (I have already found someone else using Fedora and who couldn't find how to enable word wrapping, I'll try to contact him/her).

Comment 3

[Skippy le Grand Gourou]

Ok, just made a quick test :

1/ Created new TB profile on Fedora 10, TB 2.0.0.23.
2/ Set formatting in text (why the hell is HTML the default ?!?), and set line width to whatever, according to the procedure given in the first report.
3/ Write email and send message.

Results :
1/ The width set is not taken into account for displaying in the messaging window (while it is with my regular profile, may be related to the font settings ?), only the window width is taken into account.
2/ No wrapping in the sent message.

Conclusion : I think there is clearly a bug regarding to the first result, though I didn't noticed it at first : one expect the wrapping to happen while writing, right ? Or better, wrapping regarding fixed width if the window is larger than this width, and wrapping regarding window width if the set width is larger than the window.

Stupid question : Concerning the wrapping during sending, could the SMTP server overwrite the wrapping settings ? I'm using two different servers on both machines… (I could test this point this evening though.)

Comment 4

[Skippy le Grand Gourou]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Ok, just made a quick test :
> 
> 1/ Created new TB profile on Fedora 10, TB 2.0.0.23.
> 2/ Set formatting in text (why the hell is HTML the default ?!?), and set line
> width to whatever, according to the procedure given in the first report.
> 3/ Write email and send message.
> 
> Results :
> 1/ The width set is not taken into account for displaying in the messaging
> window (while it is with my regular profile, may be related to the font
> settings ?), only the window width is taken into account.
> 2/ No wrapping in the sent message.

Tested with TB 2.0.0.23 under Arch Linux, same issue.


> Stupid question : Concerning the wrapping during sending, could the SMTP server
> overwrite the wrapping settings ? I'm using two different servers on both
> machines… (I could test this point this evening though.)

Concerning this point I now have my answer (the issue does not depend on the SMTP server).

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

sorry to ask - but you seem to be the expert :) ...

Skippy, do you see this in version 3?

Comment 6

[Skippy le Grand Gourou]

Indeed the issue seems still present in F14 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101209 Fedora/3.1.7-0.35.b3pre.fc14 Thunderbird/3.1.7).

Note that I see only the following wrapping-related keys in about:config :
editor.htmlWrapColumn;72
mail.compose.wrap_to_window_width;false
mail.wrap_long_lines;true
mailnews.wraplength;72
news.wrap_long_lines;true
view_source.wrap_long_lines;false

I guess the bug may be due to the absence of something like "editor.textWrapColumn" — creating it does not help.

Comment 7

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

I think what the reporter is seeing is "normal" behavior for the default setting for format-flowed in TB. Here are the prefs involved:
mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support
mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed

You could toggle both of those, but be forewarned that receiving mail from someone that uses format-flowed will result in clipping their format at _your_ wrap specification in your prefs.
Can make for a rather sloppy presentation.

Comment 8

[Skippy le Grand Gourou]

This issue still arises in TB7.

Following Joe's suggestion about having a look at format flowed, I read the following page : http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html

However I still don't believe that TB is behaving "normally".  Here are the default settings :
- mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support=false
- mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed=true
- mail.compose.wrap_to_window_width=false
- mail.wrap_long_lines=true
- mailnews.wraplength=72

There are a few issues, I'm not sure each or which deserve a dedicated bug file, so I'll list them here anyway and I'll change the title.  The list is not ordered.

- The wraplength setting is conflicting with the flowed format : if flowed format is disabled and wrapping enabled, then the text will be wrapped according to the settings.  However, when flowed format and wrapping are both enabled, the flowed format will apply to new text but the wrapping will apply to quoted text (this is actually what triggered this bug report).  I believe this is a bug.

- mailnews.wraplength seems to be intended as mail.compose.wraplength since it does not apply to display but only to the compose window.

- Following the previous point, there should be a setting for wrapping in email display.  The reading comfort does depend on the text width, so one should be able to set this width and it should not necessarily rely on the window width.  Thus there should be mail.display.wrap_to_window_width and mail.display.wraplength settings.

- I also noticed that the mail.wrap_long_lines setting does not seem to have any effect, but maybe I missed the point — or is it deprecated ?

Comment 9

[yfyf]

Hi, I am experiencing the behaviour described in comment #0 after a recent update to Thunderbird 12.0. I am running ArchLinux. It was working OK since as long as I remember (I guess TB 2.0?)

My settings coincide with the ones in comment #8. Let me know if I can help with more details on this.

Comment 10

[yfyf]

(In reply to yfyf from comment #9)

I also found out that if I manually rewrap the message before sending (select all, Ctrl+R), then it works as supposed to. Maybe that can explain something? Can anyone else confirm this behaviour?

Comment 11

[Skippy le Grand Gourou]

(In reply to yfyf from comment #10)

Indeed, seems that the automating of Ctrl+r is what is missing here.