Hi Terry, There's a few different possible replaces to reply, but this one's as good as any.
First off, for those who don't read to the end, in looking for documentation of Thunderbird's behaviour, I found https://www.betterbird.eu which may interest Thunderbird users. ‘Easy adoption: You can install Betterbird at the same time as Thunderbird and run them on the same profile. That means that you can try out Betterbird with zero hassle, and go back to Thunderbird if you don't like it - which is unlikely. Please read the fine print on our support page.’ > Tim wrote: > > If it makes any difference I am using Thunderbird, I am not big fan > > of it but it is the best of available email clients I have tried. > > I am also using Thunderbird, so if my messages get corrupted as > described by Graeme, it would be useful to know. Yes, your messages are ‘corrupted’. I think Thunderbird is doing it deliberately. > I was originally trained to type at an Adult Education class in > Weymouth, so was taught to put two spaces after a full-stop. I was originally trained to type by a ZX81, but I too put two spaces at the end of the sentence, and quite right too as it adds a helpful break when scanning whether in text of fixed or variable width. The books I grew up reading do this. Modern ones ‘typeset’ by Microsoft Word, etc., often don't. > If there are query marks at the beginning of this sentence, It would > be useful to know, although quite how I would be able to change after > nearly 45 years of habit. I'm not sure. Don't bother. As Stephen suggested, Graeme has a problem his end which is showing up Thunderbird's action. I'll cover that elsewhere. You're typing two spaces into Thunderbird which is sending an email with your text in it twice. Once as plain text and again as HTML for fancier formatting; these are the text/plain and text/html MIME parts you may see when looking at an email in its original format. In the plain text part, your two spaces can be two spaces. That's what happens to mine too since I only send text/plain emails. But HTML doesn't naturally have white space being significant in type or number. These two paragraphs would be rendered the same. <p>It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.</p> <p> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. </p> (Yes, this does mean HTML doesn't naturally add the nice-to-scan gap at the end of a sentence.) One approach Thunderbird could take is to say it's just tough that your two spaces don't get preserved by HTML. But it seems someone decided to take a run of spaces, keep the last, and turn all the previous ones into a non-breaking space. Non-breaking space: When writing A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships. the single space in ‘A happy’ could be formatted as a line break which would make for poor reading. Typing a non-breaking space instead prevents this as the formatting then keeps the two words together. In Unicode, U+00A0 is a non-breaking space. This is an unusual convention by Thunderbird. I know of nothing else which does this or knows to interpret it as two end-of-sentence spaces. (What I do in HTML to have a wider end-of-sentence gap is use U+2002 which is an en-width space; one which is still breakable.) I think it was a daft attempt from long ago to allow HTML emails to ‘pad out’ the text as if ASCII for crude tables, etc. This comment explains the mess which results. The rest of the page has more for those long on life. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290565#c24 -- Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2025-01-07 20:00 Check to whom you are replying Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... https://dorset.lug.org.uk New thread, don't hijack: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
