How to force TB (68.8.0) not to change characters when composing in plain text?
When composing a plain text e-mail, TB makes substitutions that I definitely do not want. I can find no way to turn off this (obnoxious) behaviour.
For example, if I type two hyphens, only one appears. Or if I type "<<" then as soon as I hit the second less-than sign, the first is removed and a single "much less than" sign ("≪") is displayed.
This seems to be new behaviour, and I need to turn it off. In other words, I want TB to display what I type without trying to interpret it.
All Replies (3)
re :For example, if I type two hyphens, only one appears.
This sounds like the two hyphens have been auto changed into an em dash.
re : I type "<<" .... a "much less than" sign ("≪") is displayed.
The much less than symbol is a mathematical sign. So computer is recognising a double hyphen and auto configurating as math sign.
This does not sound like Thunderbird because the editing/creating of emails is rather basic. It certainly is not something I can replicate. If writing in HTML then you can use Insert > Mathematical Formula. I know that MSWord can be set up to auto recognise certain keyboard entries and alter the result.
So this makes me wonder if your keyboard has been altered or whether registry keys have been altered.
Are you using a MAC? Try info at these links:
I am running current debian stable. No other application does this. Indeed, I couldn't do any work if it did, as both "--" and "<<" need to be handled transparently in almost everything I do. For example:
cout << "Hello world" << endl;
I can't even type that in an e-mail any more :-(
Fixed the issue.
In some fairly recent release (at least, recent as in "installed by debian stable"), the behaviour of TB changed, and changed silently as far as I can tell, so that if a font, even a monospaced font, supports ligatures, TB will use them in the Compose window (and probably other windows as well).
OK, I sort of understand that that's not a completely unreasonable thing to do [although one can certainly debate it: one point of using a monospaced font in the compose window is so that one can arrange things to line up correctly, and that requires a one-to-one mapping between characters and what is displayed; just because the sender has a font with particular ligatures doesn't mean that the recipient will see things the same way, and text/plain is supposed to guarantee sameness], but it sure would have been helpful if there were some reasonably-named config command to change this behaviour. Typing "ligature" in the config editor comes up with no hits, so there seems to be no way to get back the old behaviour.
In the apparent absence of a way to turn off the behaviour, it seems that one has to edit the font directly to remove the ligatures (which may have annoying side effects in other programs where one might /want/ the ligatures; I never want them, so the loss of them globally was not a problem for me).
TB really should provide a documented (and easy-to-find) way to turn off ligatures completely, at least when composing or reading e-mails.