675062 - about:support is unfriendly to copy/paste operations (way-too-little or way-too-much whitespace, depending on the section)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 726605

(Toolkit :: General, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:
 1. Visit about:support
 2. Select & copy the "graphics" section
 3. Paste into a text field or a text editor.

ACTUAL RESULTS: This pasted text:
{
Adapter DescriptionNVIDIA Corporation -- GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2Driver Version3.3.0 NVIDIA 270.41.06WebGL RendererNVIDIA Corporation -- GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2 -- 3.3.0 NVIDIA 270.41.06GPU Accelerated Windows0/1
}
That's a single, mega-long line, with no space between each label & its value. ("Adapter DescriptionNVIDIA")

EXPECTED RESULTS:
 - whitespace between label and value
 - newline after each table-entry


We manage to make this work for other chunks of about:support, though we err in the other direction of too-much-whitespace :)
e.g. the "Application Basics" table at the top yields this pasted output:
{
              Name
            

            Firefox
          
            
          
            
              Version
            

            8.0a1
          
            
          
            
              User Agent
            

            Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0a1) Gecko/20110727 Firefox/8.0a1
}
[those ^ are just the first 3 lines -- there are 4 more lines in that block, but I won't include them here]

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

FWIW, the "Copy all to clipboard" button _does_ generate useful pasted text. E.g. that gives this output for the "graphics" section:
{
  Graphics

        Adapter Description
        NVIDIA Corporation -- GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2

        Driver Version
        3.3.0 NVIDIA 270.41.06

        WebGL Renderer
        NVIDIA Corporation -- GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2 -- 3.3.0 NVIDIA 270.41.06

        GPU Accelerated Windows
        0/1
}

That's much better than the one line of output given in comment 0.  Can we format about:support such that a direct copy-paste operation will look that pretty?

Comment 2

[[:Cww]]

Even better, can we fix https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=554174 please?

Comment 3

[vulcain]

i don't understand why Firefox show us a spreadsheet and we lost it when we copy.

It's a problem when there a lot of information.

Comment 4

[vulcain]

Attachment: Screenshot of about:support in Firefox

Comment 5

[vulcain]

Attachment: Extract of copy Raw to clipboard from the same about:support in the screenshot

Comment 6

[vulcain]

Attachment: Extract of copy text to clipboard from the same about:support in the screenshot

Comment 7

[vulcain]

Attachment: Expected result

Comment 8

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Comment on attachment 698175 [details]
Expected result

(In reply to vulcain from comment #7)
> Created attachment 698175 [details]
> Expected result

That "expected result" is way beyond the scope of this bug, at least for normal copy-paste operations (which this bug is about, per comment 0).  To make copy/paste look like your expected results, we'd need to basically re-implement lynx, and be able to render arbitrary web content to an ASCII-art format. :) Probably not going to happen.

If you'd like one of the buttons at the top (e.g. "Copy raw data to clipboard") to generate its summary in a prettier format, then that's more feasible, but that's not what this bug is about -- please file a separate bug for that.

 --> Marking "expected result" attachment obsolete, since it's orthogonal to this bug's expected results.

(FWIW, on my machine (w/ up-to-date Nightly) I still see results as-described in comment 0 from copypasting individual chunks of about:support)

Comment 9

[vulcain]

My apologize for my mistaken.
So i create my bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=827036

Comment 10

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Copy and paste on all about: pages was fixed by bug 723163.  I'll mark this as a duplicate of bug 726605, even though it's newer, since that happened to be the bug that discusses and led to the bug 723163 fix.  (If I had noticed this bug earlier, this would have been that bug!)