Further to the discussion of mangling whitespace in plain text email
composer:
Manually entering, with an Enter on each line, the following:
1 - blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
is fine. (Though the draft file and received email has extra spaces
at the left of all but the first line.)
Copy and paste produces:
1 - blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
The same results happen when pasting to either to the same Mozilla's
compose window or to another application.
Cut and paste destroys whitespace larger than one space between
sentences:
Some people believe that two spaces at the end of sentences aid
readability. Others don't.
Cutting and pasting this removes one of the spaces between the
sentences.
Cut and space mangles ASCII art, such as this snaky treasure from "rain"
which I pasted in from N4.76. The paste from N4.76 resulted in this in
Mozilla's window, which is correct:
×·.¸¸.·´¨)
¸. ·´ ¸.·´¨)
(_¸.·´ ¸.·´ ¸.·×
(_¸.·´
Cut and pasted from Mozilla and to Mozilla or anything else, the result
is crook:
×·.¸¸.·´¨)
¸. ·´ ¸.·´¨)
(_¸.·´ ¸.·´ ¸.·×
(_¸.·´
I think there is something like a soft-space in Mozilla at present.
I can copy and paste my signature, or parts of it, such as:
// Robin Whittle http://www.firstpr.com.au
// Melbourne, Australia http://fondlyandfirmly.com
//
without any collapsing of spaces.
But if either:
1 - I manually type in *identical* characters, with an Enter at
the end of each line and then copy and paste,
or
2 - I copy from another application and paste to Mozilla (which
produces perfect results, visibly at least, with no lost
spaces),
and then I select and copy the text to the clipboard from Mozilla, then
pasting it in Mozilla or elsewhere results in:
// Robin Whittle http://www.firstpr.com.au
// Melbourne, Australia http://fondlyandfirmly.com
//
So the internal form of storage for the signature must be robust against
whatever space-mangling bugs are lurking in the copy function.
This is a real "gotcha-fest"!
- Robin
