Steve: Sorry for the lack of line breaks at paragraphs but the convert breaks to html function was making a mess of it.

Yeah, this is a problem. It happens because HTML doesn't pay any attention to line breaks, but they are recognized inside the textarea posting (and editing) boxes. Not really a bug, but there is an unavoidable trade off where we either have to have the problem you were seeing (where most pasted text will have too many - and incorrectly placed - <br>s if you 'convert line breaks to html) or if we changed it so that didn't happen then when you [edit]ed a post it would just be one tight mass of text without any paragraph breaks.

I've opted to have the first problem because I do more composing inside the textarea boxes (and then subsequent [edit]ing of those posts) than I do copying and pasting of text. I'm trying to find a way to have another clickable option under the posting box to deal with this situation, but I've been unable to come up with the solution. Still thinking about it though...

In any case there is nothing you could do automatically to solve this. You'd have to manually insert <br><br>s where ever you want paragraph breaks. Obviously not the best solution.
- jim 12-06-2001 7:39 pm


I realized that was probably the only solution (manually inserting the breaks) and well, call me lazy. Your decision to have it have it "compose in the window friendly" seems like the correct one. But what does Mr. Wilson do? I believe he does all his writing in a word processing prog. such as Word Perfect. (plugging Corell rather than "The Evil One") and pastes it into the window. Alex, do you insert all the html manually?
- steve 12-07-2001 12:11 am [add a comment]


  • Yeah, it basically sucks for him. I still haven't addressed his long standing complaint that text doesn't even wrap in the textbox for him (it just goes in one straight line to the right with a left/right scrollbar at the bottom.) Not too easy to edit that way. I just have no idea why his browser would do that.

    What you need is a text editor that will remove line breaks before you copy and paste it into...

    ... hey, wait. Maybe I could have it just strip out all single line breaks, but keep any that come in a series of two or more. That might actually work. I'll have to do some tests. Even if it wasn't perfect it might be pretty close, and you could neaten it up by hand.

    Also, another prospect is that if Mozilla gets just a little more mature so that I can recommend it to everyone, we can make a better text editor inside Mozilla.
    - jim 12-07-2001 12:24 am [add a comment]






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