Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Menu Items Missing

When I compose an email, the options/drop down menus for font, color, point size, etc., are available directly below the tool bar.

But when in Safari, and I click on the "Mail" icon (as in forwarding a web page) and Mail launches, the above options are absent.

Is this an old condition I just noticed, or is there a remedy?

I see exactly the same behavior, and I'm on 10.7.5 so think it's been that way for a while!

Thanks, Roger.

I wasn't sure, nor am I still, whether tis better to have a computer problem, or one of a more cebrebral nature.

Ah, the ravages of time & tide...

Do you not see an "A" icon on the toolbar? I do, and clicking it reveals the Format Bar. (Why it doesn't stay revealed on subsequent Safari-invoked email messages, as it does when opening new messages from within Mail, I don't know.) If you don't see the "A" icon on the toolbar, leave the Safari-invoked email message open, choose Customize Toolbar… from Mail's View menu, and drag the icon into the toolbar.

(I'm running OS X 10.8.4, so this is all assuming changes in Mail for Mavericks don't render these procedures obsolete.)

Bingo!

And all is again, right with the world.

Many thanks, kind sir!

I'm sure I don't know which is better!

And thanks, dk, though I'm still an old-school emailer, and rarely make any formatting changes in email. ;D

Is there a way/setting to get the toolbar to remain exposed?

Tis hardly of great import, but to access my choices, I must always click on the "A" Formatting Icon. Then, all is as divined. I merely wish to avoid this clicking step.

Doesn't seem to be.

An investigation of Mail's prefs brings to light


where the value of "TB Is Shown" indicates that the toolbar is visible (1) or not visible (0) in newly composed message windows.

Further examination also reveals



where, again, 1 and 0 indicate the visibility or non-visibility of the Format bar in newly composed message windows.

Like most prefs dealing with window size, location on screen, and toolbar configuration, these defaults aren't set in Mail's Preferences panes; they're just a record of the state of a given window, written into the app's plist to be consulted the next time that window (or window type) is opened.

It appears that during the process of opening a new Mail message window via Safari, the value of Mail's "NSToolbar Configuration ComposeWindow_NewMessage" is read, but not the value of ShowComposeFormatInspectorBar.

This would seem to be a bug, but I doubt it rises to a level sufficient to claim more than twenty seconds of an Apple engineer's attention.

Not only was my question answered, but I learned some in process. So indeed, many thanks!

As the issue is so minor, I am surprised some enterprising chap or chapette hasn't posted a third party fix. Or is that not even doable? Or, perhaps 'tis a hack that is unwise in the extreme...

If I click on the Share button on Safari's toolbar and choose Email This Page from the pop-up menu, the new message window which opens (containing in this case the page's contents rather than its URL) does display the Format Bar below the toolbar. So it's clearly not a Safari-wide issue.

Thus intrigued, I decided to mimic the action of the "envelope" button by highlighting the page's URL in the address bar, then going to the Services sub-menu of the Safari menu and choosing New Email With Selection. Lo and behold, the new message window includes the Format Bar!

There's another difference as well: the URL of which the message body is comprised is not a clickable link, presumably because it's in the message as a text selection, not as a web page address. (In Mail, when such a message is received, the URL is rendered as a clickable link.)

Finally, the new message created via the Services menu has no subject line and, perhaps not coincidentally, has no dot in the red Close button indicating unsaved changes; it's not saved in the Drafts folder until new text is entered into one of the message's text fields. (In contrast, the new message created via the envelope button has the web page's title pre-entered into the message's Subject line, and the message at its inception is saved in the Drafts folder yet sports a dot in its red close button as well.)

I don't know that any of this has any relevance to the issue you've brought up, but there is certainly something buggy about that envelope button's behavior. And it doesn't help matters that the envelope button's "Mail this web page" tool tip and the Share button's Email This Page command mean totally different things, the former referring to sending a link to a page and the latter to sending its contents.

Curious and curiouser...

I suspect Apple is aware of this anomaly by now, but what they intend to do about it, ah, now that is a mystery.