Resolved [Thunderbird Line (length) formatting Question]

Since there is no T-bird folder, I hope my question is alright here.

In the old Netscape e-mail, you could go into tools and composition and then set the formatting width to whatever number of characters you wanted which was usually 72. I'm not seeing that option anymore and I'm finding my posts in another newsgroup having lines that run on and do not appear to be formatted properly.

Any suggestions?

 

I don't understand what the T-bird folder means, but in T-bird if you want to make changes
with the wraplenghth, go to Tools|Options|Advanced|General|Config editor, and look for this line: mailnews.wraplength; it is set to 72.

 

Thanks, Westside. You know... it's odd. I've checked this out and as you mentioned, it's default is 72 characters. When I read one of my alt newsgroups, most people's posts seem to be set around 55 characters making their posts compact. Mine is supposed to be at 72 which is closer to the width of the screen and I've gotten a few angry diatribes from posters who say that I need to wrap the words better than I do. When I'm typing in T-bird for my newsgroups, they wrap automatically and look great. But when I post to the group, the lines appear to go across the screen. 55 characters seems a bit confining to me as far as my mail is concerned but it's probably great for news postings. I was hoping for a toggle sort of extension to be able to switch easily. Any extensions come to mind?

Oh... and look at your post above in terms of the length of your lines then compare my two posts. Do you see a difference in their length? And yet we're both typing into a box provided by this forum. What is going on?

 

So what you're saying, Tony
is that I need to manually hit
the return key as though I were
typing on a manual type-writer?

 

This is not a quote of entire post. It seems to be a hybrid of the two.
I am using Firefox, and I think I posted, originally, with Seamonkey. And, the question was about Thunderbird.
I modified the quotation in a way that I would, normally, do it, i.e. without the hard return. This sentence was typed without a hard return.

 

I'm assuming that the first two sentences both had hard returns. Correct?

You know, Westside, while the issue is resolved (in a manner) by my simply putting in hard returns (as though I were typing on an old manual type-writer from the past) when I place posts in a newsgroup (i.e. google forums), it's really not resolved to my satisfaction. I cannot believe that 90% of all posters to these groups in which I am a member are making their posts with hard returns. It seems to me that years ago when I used Netscape's e-mail client to post to newsgroups, I never had this issue. If memory serves it was a simple method of configuring the news portion of the client to put "x" number of characters in a line whereas the e-mail client would remain unchanged. But... I could be wrong in that my memory is not what it used to be.

Albeit, this manual method will have to suffice since I'm tired of digging through menus and trying to figure out how T-bird does these things. In short... if I had a better newsreader on the line of the old Free Agent, I'd use it instead. But things are what they are so Thunderbird will have to suffice.

 

I had been hoping for a setting wherein I could have one length for newsgroups and another for e-mail. I'd like to have my lines wrap at 55 characters for newsgroups and 72 for my mail. But your earlier method of hard returns will also work just fine, Tony. I'm not sure why it never occurred to me. Thanks.