WebKit E-mail Formatting Bug
Now and then, we get a report from a reader whose TidBITS issue has an entire article formatted as a column of text that’s a single character wide. I could tell what happened in at least two cases, but I’m utterly stumped as to what might be causing it. The problem doesn’t appear to originate on our end.
In one report where the reader forwarded the badly formatted issue to us, the problem stemmed from CSS corruption.
I’m not sure what causes this, but I’ve seen it happen to a variety of e-mails (though none from TidBITS) starting with Catalina, both in Mail itself and in my app that uses WebKit to render HTML e-mails. For me, at least, it’s a transitory problem that goes away if I relaunch the app and view the same e-mail again.
See also: Peter Steinberger.
