There are a number of posts on Apple’s discussion boards that detail a number of line-ending and other editing problems with the message composition view (an editable WebView).

Take a look at this one for starters.

Scary.

I never meant to imply that the problem was with Spell Catcher. It’s just that Spell Catcher is an application that reveals this problem in Mail. I haven’t experienced Mail adding spurious carriage returns when I am not using Spell Catcher. So in effect it is a problem between Mail and SCX, even though I agree with you that SCX is not to blame :).

I too am still noticing a number of weird problems when composing a message in Mail. (There were tons more during the beta stage.) What is this “editable WebView” thing you are referring to? Are there other Mac OS X applications in Tiger that use the same “engine”?

Thanks for exploring this further and filing some bug reports… Yours probably have more clout than mine!

See this post.

Try this:

Turn on the Unicode Hex Input keyboard in International/Input Menu, activate it.

A quick tutorial on how it works: hold down option and type 4 hex digits to produce a character. Useful for Unicodes that are hard to find on a “regular” keyboard layout.

So, for example, option-0-0-4-1 will insert an uppercase “A” (41 hex).

Now we want to test what happens when inserting a return (0x000D) – option-0-0-0-D.

Try it in TextEdit. You get the expected return character.
Try it in a Mail message composition window. Whah? Looks like a space to me. Thing is, it’s NOT a space. If you select that character and drag it to the Character Palette’s Character Info image well, it’s indeed a return.
BUT Mail is rendering it as a space.

Things are not right here…not sure how many things, but enough.

OK – editable WebViews. WebViews have been around since Safari was first introduced. It uses them (or some variant) to display web content, as do many other OS X apps. Before Tiger, these weren’t editable – display only.

But in 10.4, these can be edited. It’s not a trivial addition to WebView. It’s a significant and complex one. Not too surprising it’s got bugs, but we’re running into some pretty blatant ones! Mail uses them in the message body of a compose window. I know that Safari uses them to implement support for contenteditable.

See this blog, specifically the last entry with the link to a demo.

Same exact thing happens in this contenteditable demo. So it’s not just Mail. It’s the underlying widget.

Sure hope it gets fixed soon! Off to file some radars shortly…