On 27Aug2020 18:49, Hokan <hokan.ho...@gmail.com> wrote: >I looked at this message in Thunderbird and the columns aligned just >fine. I checked the Thunderbird config and there is a checkbox for >"Use fixed width font for plain text messages"
Aye. I'm surprised it isn't a default - there are some very nice looking fixed width fonts. >Similarly, Outlook seems to display plain-text messages with a fixed- >width font, but I'm not really an Outlook user so I don't know where >that's configured. > >Gmail, on the other hand, seems to use variable fonts. I found an >option to default to fixed font but the columns in the quoted message >still didn't line up. I guess that option is for composing messages? Looks like, if we're looking at the same thing. I only found the one setting, in the General settings. GMail's just awful. >I suppose most people use Gmail and other web-based email now-a-days >and maybe the others are similarly poorly behaved. Yeah, that is my impression too. Even people out here, where satellite is common and access is thus _very_ laggy, use gmail on the web instead of via a local reader (TBird, LookOut, whatever) that fetches behind the scenes. I suspect the best way forward is a composition mode with pleasant fixed with support that will draw an HTML table in a text/html alternative part. There've been a few threads on settings for this, IIRC. On a personal basis I've be very happy with an (activatable) mode to compose in markdown for those few occasions I really want some formatting, which resulted in a 3 way multipart/alternative message: plain, markdown, html. An ad hoc page of interest: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-markdown-table/ Cheers, Cameron Simpson <c...@cskk.id.au>