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   Quick Solution to Apple Mail's TidBITS Wrapping Woes

   Adam C. Engst

   A number of people have written in to alert me to the fact that Apple
   Mail is failing to render this week's HTML issue of TidBITS properly,
   instead displaying a tremendously long line length that requires
   expanding the window or scrolling horizontally. Feh!

   [1][tn_Badly-wrapped-lines.jpg]

   The reason centers on the longest command line recipe in the article
   '[2]Do Cool Things on the Command Line with Five Quick Recipes' (1
   February 2016). Apparently, when a message contains text that uses the
   CODE tag in HTML, Mail sets its maximum line length based on the
   longest line. That decision seems like a mistake to me, but I'll look
   into alternative ways to format what we call 'code text,' or text that
   the user is supposed to type. It's also possible that there's a bug
   here that needs to be reported to Apple; Mail's behavior in this
   situation is suboptimal, even if it's not actively incorrect.

   For now though, here's a quick trick for how you can read any message
   that suffers from ludicrously long lines. With the message open, just
   choose Message > Send Again. That opens a new compose window showing
   the contents of the issue, with lines that wrap properly to the width
   of the window. When you're done reading, close the window, navigate to
   your Drafts folder, and delete the draft you created. (Interestingly,
   the wrapping of the draft is wrong in Mail's preview pane too; it's
   correct only in the draft in its own window.)

   I realize you may be seeing this solution too late to help for the
   malformed TidBITS issue, but file it away in your head in case you run
   across this problem again.

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/resources/2016-02/Badly-wrapped-lines.png
   2. http://tidbits.com/article/16231

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