Comment 137 for bug 10883

(In reply to Daniel Kabs, reporting bugs since 2002 from comment #55)
> What exactly (UI elements, behaviour, etc) do you want to be implemented?
Personally, I'd implement what was asked for with minimal change since every change we make breaks someone's workflow.

So on the options menu I'd have a new menu entry.

When in a plain text composition, it would read:
Convert message to rich text (HTML).
That would show the formatting toolbar, add the usual HTML options, like delivery mode, to the menu and convert the content of the message. Turn what I called embellishment (*bold*, _underline_, /italics/) into the respective HTML tags. That's quite hard, I think, since we also need list processing and superscripts (x^2).

When in a HTML composition, the new option would read:
Convert message to plain text.
When using this option a big warning would be displayed that you will now lose most formatting. Maybe there should be a check-box to disable the warning next time.
That would hide the formatting toolbar, remove the usual HTML options, like delivery mode, from the menu and convert the content of the message. Bold, underline, italics, superscripts, lists are all converted to plain text.

Optionally there could be a reduced formatting toolbar for plain text compositions that would offer minimum formatting, like bold, underline, italics, etc.. You can see that in many web editors which add markdown (* ** _) to messages. Note that it would be special TB markdown, since TB uses * _ and /.

Big job for little gain, that's why it was never attempted.