Plain text body formatting broken
 

As of maybe yesterday or so, the plain text message body formatting function in the compose screen seems to be broken. This is the one where it will reflow your lines of text to fit within 80 characters or so. I really like this (because I'm a hopelessly old-fashioned schmuck) and make heavy use of it. It is accessed by Ctrl-M in the compose window, in case you didn't know :D

I hope that the brokenness doesn't mean it has been eliminated. I will by truly unhappy if that is the case.

I fully expect that close to zero people reading this (except Bill ;)) have any idea of what I'm talking about, but figured I'd try here first before submitting a ticket :D

It's working ok for me Win 10 + Firefox

Thanks for the word, Terry... but now I'm a bit worried because it didn't occur to me that it might be browser related. And unfortunately it's not that they fixed it between my post and yours. Still broken for me on Chromium/Linux :(

Its Firefox 54.0.1

I dont use US text but the UK one so I'm not sure if that will make any difference.

This was a legit bug and is now fixed. Thanks to Rob M.

I did not know this feature existed.

Can we please get an option to automatically enable this for plain-text messages (limit to 80 lines)?

Can we also get an option to send plain-text attachments as well, not base64 encoded?

These are very common requirements for open source mailing lists, and would make the web interface much more usable for these communications.

Thanks!

Welcome to the forum, bananaman.

Since this is your first post, I'll assume you haven't been lurking in the forum for a long time, and might not know that it's unlikely (ISTM) that FM will implement such an idea, even though it would seem easy, if it would benefit only a tiny (tiny!) constituency in their userbase.

Also think about how it would work from a UX standpoint: would the compose screen allow you to type anything (any line lengths), and then reformat AFTER you press the send button, with you never seeing the result until it appears on the ML, or in your Sent box? As a user, I wouldn't like it to work that way. Things that shouldn't be reflowed would get reflowed (like quoted headers) and it would look awful. I think the way it works now is just right (remember that you can limit reflow to certain portions of the message by selecting them)

You can try submitting a support ticket with your request (requests made here will almost certainly not be noticed, and even less likely to be responded to), but again... don't be disappointed if they refuse, or never get around to it.

I prefer having control over formatting plain text to 80ch lines. Most clients will properly word-flow long lines to the recipient's screen width, but not if there are CR/LFs at the end of the 80ch lines, and that can end up looking pretty bad on a mobile device.

Of course this shouldn't be something that's on by default, but if it can be done with a keyboard shortcut, it should be trivial to add a switch to always enable it.

It would reflow in the editor as you type, not after you send it (that wouldn't make any sense).

Thunderbird has this option, check it out if you're curious about how it's implemented.

Anyway, thanks for the responses. This discussion seems mostly pointless if FM isn't reading.