kmail + qtwebengine (double-line spacing)

[rocky7x]

Hi,

I see that KDE Apps 16.08 has been distributed. As far as I know, Kmail should be using QtWebEngine instead of QtWebKit since version 16.08 - is this true? i ask because I'm trying to use it with M$ Exchange server and when replying, the composer is always using double-line spacing for all lines of the quoted mail. So I was waiting for the switch to the new backend to see whether this behavior is fixed... If not does anyone maybe have an idea how to fix the double spacing between the lines of the quoted mail?

Cheers...

[AJSlye]

I think this has to do with html formatted emails that kmail doesn't handle properly.
Have you tried setting kmail to use plain text rather than html?

[rocky7x]

Using plaintext is not really an option, since we have to format the mails properly in our company. Everybody uses Outlook so I have to be as similar with everyone as possible Is there maybe some fix or option which could make it work? For example both Thunderbird and Evolution format those mails correctly in HTML. But I like kmail the most so would really like to use KDE PIM for the job...

[AJSlye]

I'm not sure. Doing a quick google search I've found various unresolved issues with double spacing in html emails with kmail dating all the way back to 2004. https://www.google.com/#q=kmail+double+spacing

I also found this that suggests that there are some issues with the way outlook formats it's line breaks in html e-mails that kmail, gmail and other client's can't interpret that causes this issue. http://www.slipstick.com/problems/messag...le-spaced/

[rocky7x]

Hi,

Yes I saw all those articles and unfortunately I was also not able to solve the issue. The point is that Thunderbird and Evolution already know how to properly handle Outlook replies. I've debugged the reply mails composed by Kmail and found that each HTML paragraph has a top-margin and bottom-margin property set to 12px. That is the reason for the double spacing. When I set that property to 0px, the double spacing disappears and the mails are formatted correctly. A brute-force way of achieved this is:
1. enable external editor in Kmail and set it to Kate
2. in Kate search & replace all "top-margin: 12px" and "bottom-margin: 12px" with "top-margin: 0px" and "bottom-margin: 0px"
3. immediately upon closing Kate, the mail in the composer window of Kmail becomes correctly formatted
4. however, one cannot edit the mail in the composer window because another instance of kate opens
5. the only way of editing the mail is using the "Insert HTML" functionality of Kmail composer, but one has to insert the HTML tags etc. for formatting, so it's like composing HTML in a notepad.

For basic mailing, it's not a problem, but for more complex formatting, not to mention tables, it's quite cumbersome. I will try to report this back to Kmail developers as well, maybe they can do something with it...