[Evolution] editing "invisible" non-removable tables in messages

[Iain Buchanan <iaindb netspace net au>]

Hi,

Whenever I copy and paste just about anything into evolution, even
though I am composing in plain text, I get these annoying tables
appearing everywhere, with little dashed lines around them.

That's not so bad, but the annoying thing is no matter what, I can't
delete them (in evolution alone)!  I position the cursor well before the
table, and press delete and the table isn't deleted.  Or I position the
cursor at the end, and press backspace, but the cursor is just moved
around in the table.

I can delete the content, but not the tables themselves, unless I select
just about the whole message, and delete the whole lot.

What's most annoying is I'm getting these tables when I use plain text
composing.  So I saved a draft of the message, and had a look at the
source in ~/.evolution/mail/local/Drafts and guess what?!!  There is a
html component of the message in there!

Why? I don't want it, I didn't ask for it, and if I wanted table
formatting I would explicitly select "format in html".

I've discovered three ways around this:

1. Save a draft copy of message, close evolution, edit
~/.evolution/mail/local/Drafts to remove html sections, and re-open
evolution

2. Save-as a file, edit the file to remove unwanted parts, then import
the file back to evolution

3. Copy the text from <wherever> but don't paste it into evolution,
instead paste it into emacs or something similar, then copy it again and
paste it into evolution.


Half time, have a drink...


I'm sure you agree, this is not an efficient way of getting around the
problem.  I would instead expect evolution to do one of the following:

1. ** When pasting anything into plain-text emails, paste the text, the
whole text, and only the text. **

I hate to say it, and I am not flaming, but windows handles copying and
pasting much better than linux ever has.  I only mention this because I
think the windows method should be adopted here:  The item to be pasted
must conform to the content where it is being pasted.  eg. a, pasting a
picture into a text only editor or email, should paste anything
_in_text_ (ie. name, comments, whatever), not the picture. eg. b,
pasting html into a text only editor or email, should paste anything
_in_text_, eg the content, but not the html.

I understand that there are issues with X, gnome, evolution, and the
clipboard, but that doesn't affect the issue here.

or,

2. When composing, there should be an "edit source" view of the message,
enabling the user to tweak the output.  Hide it behind pop-ups,
warnings, hidden options, whatever, but it should be there.

1. and 2. lead to a principle of programming anything:

** Never override a users explicitly selected option. **

Pop up messages giving alternatives, have more options, or create
multiple messages in different formats, but never decide that the
program knows better.  (Of course, I'm not talking about behind the
scenes file system and email protocol stuff, I mean the GUI).

So, in conclusion, I think evolution should:
1. when pasting, only paste according to the content of the destination.
That may be
 a. text and only text, in the case of text-only emails, or
 b. tables, formatting, pictures, etc, in the case of html-formatted
emails

2. allow all content to be edited.  In the case of 1a above, this is
just text, so there is no issue.  In the case of 1b above, this includes
other content, so there must be a way of editing every part of it,
including the tables.


Now that I've finished my rant, I would appreciate someone letting me
know whether there is an issue being worked on, or whether it is like it
is and I have no hope of influencing it.

If I do have a hope of influencing it, I would be glad to try.  I so far
haven't found a bug on bugs.gnome.org that mentions this behaviour...

many thanks for your comments.
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb netspace net au>