On 18 Sep 2010, at 11:45, Joshua Juran wrote:
I used to hate Apple Mail's inability to allow me to display incoming messages
in a fixed-width font (as needed to view ASCII art) except by viewing the raw
message (which only works as intended with text messages, but at least ASCII
art users tend to send text).
Oh, really?
http://abuse.mooli.org.uk/applemail.png
Not being able to render in a fixed-width font is a deal-breaker, and I'd have dropped it
as a MUA if it couldn't manage it. As you can see, it even works without having to
view-source. I achieved this major feat through the cunning technique of ticking the box
in the preferences labelled "Use fixed-width font for plain text messages".
That was with 10.4 "Tiger". Now that I've 'upgraded' to to 10.5 "Leopard", I
don't have this issue. Instead, I have the issue that Apple Mail is unable to display incoming
messages in a fixed-width font *even if* I view the raw message, which is now rendered in the same
proportional font used for the default view. The Fonts panel happily lets me select another font
-- though nothing happens.
This piece of ASCII-art both demonstrates that Apple Mail can render
fixed-width fonts just fine - as that's what I'm using to send it - and also
neatly summarises my diagnosis of your complaint:
____ _____ ____ _ __ _ ____
| _ \| ____| __ )| |/ / / \ / ___|
| |_) | _| | _ \| ' / / _ \| |
| __/| |___| |_) | . \ / ___ \ |___
|_| |_____|____/|_|\_\/_/ \_\____|
Now, Mail.app does have the highly annoying feature of always showing the text/html part
of multipart/alternative messages (aka "HTML mail"), but a quick hit of
bathtub-cloverleaf-P brings up the text/plain part instead. In a fixed-width font.
