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Kmail word wrap

digitata

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Thursday, September 1st 2005, 4:18pm

Kmail word wrap

I'm using Kmail 1.8.2 and generally no problems with it... except I can not find any way of enabling an 'onscreen only' word-wrap when I compose an email.

Basically, I want to be able to freely type as I please, with text word-wrapped as required to fit in the message composition window. So if I resize the window, or if the recipient is using different size window, the email will adjust to fit accordingly.

I know you can set a word-wrap of 78 characters for example, but I don't want this to be fixed to a set length. I want it to be dynamic and without actually storing / setting newlines.

Is this possible? I found a couple of posts elsewhere on the net complaining baout the exact same thing but no resolution as such. This is really, really annoying IMHO!

frozenJim

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Friday, September 16th 2005, 8:05pm

I agree. This is an unusual thing to see - no screen-based wordwrap. I miss it and feel that it makes my desktop feel just a little bit less professional.

Is this the correct place to discuss this type of thing?

anda_skoa

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Friday, September 16th 2005, 8:33pm

Can't you just disable the composers word wrap?

Cheers,
_
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digitata

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Friday, September 16th 2005, 8:45pm

Unfortunately, disabling 'word wrap' in KMail's message composer just means the current paragraph will continue on a single line which is to be expected, but not what I am after.

What I am after, is a 'dynamic' word wrap feature like nearly every other email application utilises (e.g. Thunderbird, Outlook). At the moment with KMail, you can either have no word-wrap at all, or fixed character length word-wrap. With no word-wrap, you have to scroll the window horizontally to see the whole paragraph and with word-wrap enabled, the paragraph will wrap at X characters, regardless of composition window size.

I loooooove Kontact, the whole suite, it's great! But this one missing feature really plays on my mind, lol. I just want my text to fill the width of the window, whatever it's size may be.

frozenJim

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Friday, September 16th 2005, 9:36pm

Right. Currently we have a choice of emails that look like a single line as you compose, or emails that are truncated on EVERY line at 78 characters (or whatever you have set). The first option creates the right email - but it is tough to create originally. The second option is easier to create originaly - bit it creates the wrong final copy.

What the world is used to is the option to have dynamic word wrapping. It is a standard in any HTML-based editor. In effect, KMail has forced a <br> after each 78 characters which is NOT what most people are hoping for in a word-wrap feature.

It isn't a bug... it's just a feature that some of us find questionable.

Take the HTML editor we are using right now in this forum for example. You do not type your carriage returns or line-feeds, they are dynamic. If you want you MAY create a "hard-return" by pressing the ENTER key. THIS is what most consider to be the norm in email creation.

Did I just make a simple question more complex? :rolleyes:

anda_skoa

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Friday, September 16th 2005, 9:37pm

Ah, I see.

Don't know which version of KDE/KMail you are using and if it the editor component can be changed there. (*)

In any case you could use an external editor.

Cheers,
_

(*) I once read that KMail will allow a setting where it uses the editor component a user has configured in control center.
But I don't know if and if yes in which version this should have happend.
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bozy

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Sunday, September 18th 2005, 2:06am

Just as an FYI, there's a wish in the KDE bug database for this feature...

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31951

frozenJim

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Sunday, September 18th 2005, 2:29am

Quoted

Originally posted by bozy
Just as an FYI, there's a wish in the KDE bug database for this feature...

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31951

Aha. That is the answer.

Thank you.

daihard

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Friday, September 30th 2005, 7:01pm

Hope this isn't off-topic, but it looks like word-wrapping does not work correctly with non-ASCII (i.e. multibyte) characters. For instance, if I type in Japanese, the line grows twice as long until it wraps. The problem seems to be the way KMail determines when to wrap the line. Instead of using the number of bytes, it seems to use the number of characters. Since UTF-8 and other multibyte character sets typically use 2 bytes per character, it means that a line consisting of 78 Japanese characters will be about as long as the one containing 156 English characters!

IMO, what should happen is for KMail to first detemine the charset it's using, and then to figure out where to wrap lines depending upon the charset. What do you think?
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