Compose a plaintext message with format=flowed and text wrapping set to a reasonable (nonzero) number: mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed = true mailnews.wraplength = 72 (e.g.) Compose a message with a paragraph long enough to wrap. Go into the middle of the paragraph and add more text: as the end of the line advances beyond the wrap column, the entire paragraph reflows. Now select Edit|Rewrap Again type some text in the middle of a line in the paragraph: the rewrapped lines have been given hard line breaks, and only the line reflows as it extends beyond the wrap column. The reason I select Edit|Rewrap during composition is to rewrap the quoted text in a reply, not the text I'm writing. The only effect Rewrap has on the text being composed is to strip the f=f info -- it doesn't actually rewrap composed lines with hard breaks at the end, such as for several long lines of pasted text. (Maybe that's another bug or RFE.) But if I want hard breaks in my own text, I can type them in. Fixing the stripped out f=f end-of-line spaces is a much more tedious job. This is related to bug 155622.

The problem here is that nsPlaintextEditor::Rewrap is wrapping everything, including the new text, to the length gotten from GetWrapWidth() (which normally comes from a pref) before it gets passed to nsInternetCiter::Rewrap. The editor is doing this because its save architecture is all screwed up: it passes flags through its various save routines but it has no way to pass wrap column, so it always falls back on calling GetWrapWidth() just before saving. It would be better to pass a wrap column through SharedOutputString and OutputToString, and use some special case (perhaps -1) to mean "check the pref". Then cases like Rewrap which don't want wrapping could pass 0 (no wrap). A simple workaround that might work is to remove the OutputFormatted flag from the SharedOutputString call in nsPlaintextEditor::Rewrap, but that's dangerous because if any html gets in there (e.g. the user pastes html from an external app into the html compose window) then calls rewrap, the html formatting may be lost forever. And it might not work anyway. (My tree is in a shambles right now so it'll need rebuilding before I can find out whether it works.) Seth, this bug should probably be on my list, but I'm not sure whether I can commit to fixing the editor routines right away, so if you need a quick fix you might want to hold on to the bug for that. If you don't have anyone who can work on it, then send it my way.

This is the dupe I meant. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 223276 ***

Sorry, marked the wrong bug.

I suppose that if no text is selected, it should rewrap only the quoted text, leaving new text alone. If something is seleted, it should rewrap what's selected be it quoted, new or a mixture. But the main issue is that it should keep the trailing spaces at soft line-ends.

Nearly 2 years of inactivity. Should this bug be reassigned?