Updated “Format” feature

For many years FastMail has had a powerful “Format” feature on the compose screen. This feature attempts to intelligently reformat and reflow test, quoted text, lists, etc. It’s based on the well known module Text::Autoformat by Damian Conway.

http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Text-Autoformat-1.13/lib/Text/Autoformat.pm

Unfortunately a few months back, a serious issue was discovered that caused certain data to be changed, in particular, a set of times was interpreted as a list that needed renumbering so:

7:30 - Catch flight
9:30 - Arrive at conference

Became:

7:30 - Catch flight
8:30 - Arrive at conference

To avoid this, we turned off the list processing mode of the Format function, but unfortunately this disabled all list processing, so obviously lists like:

* Get milk
* Walk the dog
* Buy the paper

Would be turned into the single line:

* Get milk * Walk the dog * Buy the paper

After a bit of work, and some discussion with Damian, we have now installed a new version of Text::Autoformat that:

• Will correctly detect numbered, bulleted and lettered lists and
  format them
• Will not attempt to renumber numbered lists to ensure there is no
  data corruption
• Fixes a number of other small bugs (certain lettered lists)

This has been rolled out to all servers.