663097 - Color Picker / Quick-Styles / <Style>

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[D Merrick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10

In message composition, the colour picker shows the colour of the current selection.
Now obviously we can see with our eyes the colour of the current selection - what we actually want is to apply colours, rather than know what's selected :)

In particular, the same colour as last used is especially useful; if you're going through an email highlighting headings, currently you have to keep popping the colour table up in order to get the last used colour, which is quite a pain when you have to do this lots of time in a row.
Word (2003) has it absolutely right - the colour-picker button shows the last applied colour, which if you click applies that colour, and a descrete drop arrow beside it allows you to pick a new colour which is applied to the text selection and also becomes the new active colour for subsequent use which you can use by click on the button rather than the drop arrow beside it.

Even better - or as well - would be the ability to create an active style with the properties of color, size, fontname, italics, bold (each value also allowing blank entry, whose meaning would be don't apply that style property) - so that then you can just select and click an apply-style button lots of times to apply your style to many places in the email, such as "Bold, Red, Italic". This would be remembered for next time; to remember multiple named styles would be a useful extra, but not essential. A facility to create <style> .classes </style> and use them would also be very useful.

thanks in advance,

d

Reproducible: Always