This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

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

When I paste a section of text, it automatically reverts to "paragraph" format even though I've set the default "body text".

  • 5 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by sfhowes

more options

I write reports on Word that then get copied into an email to be sent around. These reports have formatting as required but once they get copied into my email Thunderbird assumes the format should be "paragraph" instead of "body text", which is my default. The only way to fix this so far is to manually set the email to "body text" and delete the extra spaces in between the lines. But surely there is a better way of doing this, no?

In Word you can "paste special" with either source or destination formatting, which is very helpful. I'm new to Thunderbird after having mostly used the Windows Mail app for a while and this issue never exists with that (I assume because it's a lot more simplistic).

I write reports on Word that then get copied into an email to be sent around. These reports have formatting as required but once they get copied into my email Thunderbird assumes the format should be "paragraph" instead of "body text", which is my default. The only way to fix this so far is to manually set the email to "body text" and delete the extra spaces in between the lines. But surely there is a better way of doing this, no? In Word you can "paste special" with either source or destination formatting, which is very helpful. I'm new to Thunderbird after having mostly used the Windows Mail app for a while and this issue never exists with that (I assume because it's a lot more simplistic).

All Replies (5)

more options

Copying directly into TB from word processing or other external apps is usually discouraged, due to the non-standard formatting introduced. If you Paste Without Formatting (Ctrl+Shift+V) into TB, is the body text formatting preserved?

more options

No I've tried that. It doesn't preserve any of the formatting, but it does fix the double spacing issue

more options

That's the intended result: the formatting in Word is not preserved, and the format choice in TB is maintained. If you need to transmit the content with full Word formatting, attach a Word document. Email is for sending html or plain text.

more options

That makes no sense. It's not some special formatting that TB can't do. It's simply bolded and underlined sections.

more options

Try this: paste the content from Word directly into TB, then select the entire message body (Ctrl+A), then Insert/HTML... to view the html source. Do you see formatting added by Word beyond the normal formatting for bold or underlined content? There must be some that forces TB to change from body text to paragraph.