ROBERT MACK said:
When I type a long article in Notepad & paste into WindowsMail line
breaks become messed up, forcing me to go back to editing "business"
and click/delete redundant line breaks as often as there're lines in
a document, if it's 1000 lines, go ahead and spend time clicking for
an hour!
This make plain text editor unworkable In Vista +WindowsMail
environment, due to weird linebreaks handling.
I'm running Vista 64 home premium. The problem doesn't appear to be
in Notepad (or Wordpad) because copying text from them preserves the
proper line breaks when I insert text with very long lines into an
e-mail set to plain text or to Rich Text format. Do you get the
screwed up line breaks *as soon as* you cut/paste Notepad text into a
Windows Mail e-mail? (I don't.) Or do they only appear after another
operation, like hitting Send and opening it from the Out box or the
Sent box; or examining a received e-mail of it? (I do get that under
certain conditions, see below.) And while I haven't tested this as
throughly as the plain text format, sending pasted text in Rich Text
format seems to eliminate the whole problem. Compare your XP/OE and
Vista/WM settings. If you've been sending in Rich Text format from XP
but not from Vista then that's the source of the difference. In Rich
Text, uncommanded insertion of truncating line breaks don't even seem
to be an issue. Only hard ENTER breaks will affect the lines. So set
WM to send in Rich Text.
Getting back to plain text format, if the extra line breaks do not
appear *as soon as* you insert the text, it may still just be your
Windows Mail settings. If you still want to send in plain text
format, in WM do Tools/Options/Send. In Mail Sending Format select
Plain Text. What value is Automatically Wrap Text set at? Probably
its default setting of 60 or 65. If you're sending e-mail in plain
text format, there's the problem (and the partial cure).
Raise it to its max value of 132. Any e-mail sent in plain text
format won't break until it exceeds 132 characters per line. Editing
any line in excess of 132 to eliminate unwanted line breaks in the
received e-mail shouldn't be too much of a chore for the recipient.
You just can't fix it before sending it, only after it's received.
And while that won't prevent breaking up long paragraphs of article
text, it will reduce the amount of editing. But the same
132-character plain text format limitation applies to OE in XP, at
least my copy of it (see next). So I'm wondering if you hadn't been
using Rich Text format in your OE/XP.
OE set to plain text format behaves the same way in XP. Inserting
text copied from Notepad into an OE e-mail keeps all the proper line
breaks. But if the plain text setting for Automatically Wrap Text is
set at 60 it will wrap all lines at 60 when you send it as plain text.
You don't see this, though, until you send it. If you open it after
hitting Send but while it's still in the Out box, or open the version
in the Sent folder, you'll see all the lines truncated at 60 or
whatever. So that's what your e-mail recipient will get. (And if
you're getting e-mailed code or other text with the same pattern, the
problem is with your sender's e-mail settings.) Even in XP I had to
change the auto-wrap to 132 so that only lines over 132 characters
would be truncated/wrapped. Try setting plain text formatting to its
minimum of 30 so that at least several lines of text will truncate
with an unwanted new line break. You won't see the 30-character
wrapping on the e-mail but then hit Send and open the version in the
Out or Sent folders. If that screwed up the Sent e-mail plain text
with all lines truncated at 30, then you now know the source of the
problem and the auto-wrap work-around should work at least as well in
Vista as it does in XP (which as I noted, isn't perfect).
If you're getting the screwed-up line breaks *as soon as* you paste
copied text from Notepad into an e-mail, then something else is at
work here and it's probably not inherent in WM, Notepad, or Vista.
Try immediately inserting the same offending text from the clipboard
into another program like Word where you can see if unwanted line
breaks are getting inserted there. If not, that will tell you that
the problem is specific to, although not necessarily a planned
"feature" of, inserting text into WM. Based on my tests here, if text
is getting screwed up as soon as you insert it, I'd suspect a
corrupted system file before condemning the whole OS. If the
extraneous line breaks appear when pasting the offending text into
Word, it might even be a clipboard problem.
