Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Firefox leadership team to talk about Firefox priorities in 2024. Mark your calendar! Thursday, June 13, 17:00 - 19:00 UTC.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Lolu chungechunge lwabekwa kunqolobane. Uyacelwa ubuze umbuzo omusha uma udinga usizo.

Entering an ASCII Special Character

  • 5 uphendule
  • 0 zinale nkinga
  • 1 view
  • Igcine ukuphendulwa ngu Matt

BillTreloar
BillTreloar
more options

I use PhraseExpress to insert an em-dash {asc 0151} for me. It works in all applications except Thunderbird.

It used to work fine until a recent Thunderbird update. Now, instead of entering the em-dash, it enters a line break followed by the em-dash and followed by an additional line break.

What can I do to restore this to the way it used to work in Thunderbird?

I use PhraseExpress to insert an em-dash {asc 0151} for me. It works in all applications except Thunderbird. It used to work fine until a recent Thunderbird update. Now, instead of entering the em-dash, it enters a line break followed by the em-dash and followed by an additional line break. What can I do to restore this to the way it used to work in Thunderbird?
Ama-screenshot ananyekiwe

All Replies (5)

david
david
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

I cannot answer your question, but I can share that the addon, unicodify, can insert emdash automatically when double dashes are inserted.

sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 25 Contributor
more options

On W10/TB 102, hold the Alt key and type 0151 on the numeric keyboard.

BillTreloar
BillTreloar Umnikazi wombuzo
more options

Considering that I use PhraseExpress for vastly more than this example, and on many applications beside Thunderbird, I'm not willing to give it up. But if I don't give it up, the same trigger (two hyphens) is likely to cause a conflict between PhraseExpress and Unicodify.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think it's the right solution for me.

BillTreloar
BillTreloar Umnikazi wombuzo
more options

sfhowes - thanks for the idea. But the habit of typing two hyphens is so firmly imprinted on my brain that getting used to this approach is very unlikely to happen — specially since I use the two-hyphen shortcut on several other apps. (Like I just did here.)

I'd just like Thunderbird to revert to its prior behavior. The new behavior seems like a bug.

Matt
Matt
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

It could be a bug, but I would expect it to be a side effect of the change of the user interface from XUL to XHTML. That it works in Firefox and Not Thunderbird may point to a bug given both are built on the same engine and Mozilla platform.

Have you tried opening the error console? Clearing the error console and then trying your whatever it is to see if there is some sort of error logged might shed some light. Knowing what it was would probably be helpful here.

Just to be clear, the mail spec uses a double dash to signify the start of the signature block for email archiving tools. So is it only this sequence that is causing you issues?