537467 - Provide Option Not to Wrap Displayed Message

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[David E. Ross]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091206 SeaMonkey/2.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Thunderbird/3.0

For a message (mail or news) that has long lines, there should be an option not to wrap the lines except where explicit line-breaks appear.  This is needed for messages that contain data in tabular form.  

The option should be available as a user-oriented capability, not as a preference variable reached only through the Config Editor.  For example, it could be an item on the pull-down context menu when the cursor is over the message.  I suggest that the option initialize to its default (do wrapping) for each message.  


Reproducible: Always




See for example <news:hhik7p$bj3$[e-mail]> (Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Subject: We Write HTML, From: The Doctor, Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:41:29 +0000 (UTC)).  

An ASCII message (the convention for newsgroup messages) contains a table with the first column being years and 12 addition columns, one for each month.  With Thunderbird, the lines all wrap between Oct and Nov, making the table unreadable.  

Yes, I can see the unwrapped table if I look at the message source.  For this bug (and others), I don't consider resorting to calling up the message source to be a user-oriented solution.  See the reply <news:[e-mail]> to the cited message (same thread, From: Stan Brown, Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 06:36:09 -0500).

Comment 2

[chris.friesen]

Arguably this is NOT a dupe of 534068, although they're related.  This one is about displaying the received message, while the other one is about not flowing/wrapping when sending a message.