Are you talking about hanging indents, initial indents or something else.

Then we have to establish if Word actually places that information on the clipboard. A copy places the information in many formats, everything from words own format to plain text.

Personally I use freeclipboard viewer to perform such tasks as it not only shows the formats on the clipboard, but provides access to each.

What I can say is using word 2013, I had no issue copying leading indents of half an inch into Thunderbird, but I has created them in word using the correct setting for leading indents, not using tabs which simply do not really exist in HTML.

These are the settings I used in Word.

This is the result in Thunderbirds editor.

What many folk do not understand is that typograpical functions need to be translated for online viewing. One of the first and most successful attempts to do this was the proprietary Adobe document format (PDF). Some twenty years later it is still around and is often the preferred format for documents being send by government and big business, because they can largely control how it looks when viewed online and is very tolerant of poor document layout as it uses the printer language postcript to define the document.

There is only a loose translation between word processing with it's typographical focus being on putting the written word on paper in very specific places and at very specific sizes and HTML which is focused on screen reading.

If you want to get functions to transfer, you must be fairly exacting in your implementation. Unfortunately one of the big selling points of word has always been anyone can bash out a page and a half and make it look ok on paper, and PDF has allowed this to carry over to email attachments. This has been a big "feature", but it has not made much of a contribution to the overall body of knowledge that really is required to use a product like word to the best advantage.

I must admit I struggled to set this up, as I have not used Word for anything but the odd support topic since office 2003 went away, Microsoft got a ribbon and I used my feet. I hated it then and nothing has changed, it is still infuriating.

Thanks so much for your reply. I am copying text from Word 2007 with a first line indent of .5" just like your picture above. Free Clipboard Viewer has lots of options beginning with "preview", and only one of them shows my indents (namely, when I click on "enhanced metafile"), but I assume that means that my first line indent is indeed being copied to the clipboard. However, your picture (above) of the results in "Thunderbird's editor" shows a line just above the blue text reading "body text; variable width; edit; HTML". I can get a screen showing "body text" and "variable width" but I can't find anything that has "edit" or "HTML". Could this be related to my problem? Is there something called "Thunderbird's editor" that I am not seeing or is that just the blank email that comes up when I click on "Write".

In any case, when I paste my text into a new email, I lose all the first line indents. Any further ideas would be much appreciated.

The edit/HTML in my case is inserted by the HTMLEdit addon. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/thunderhtmledit/

Is should have no real impact as it is designed to expose the raw HTML, not something you would be wanting to do, and something I only want to do when trying to sort out issues on this forum. It does change the font box so you see the font name in the actual font, but that is just a quirl because Jorg liked the idea in another addon.

Word usually places a HTML object on the clipboard, and that would be Thunderbird first choice, as the body of an email only has two options, plain text and HTML. HTML obviously offering more formatting options.

If you have the font name drop down appearing in the composer then HTML email is what you are creating. If it is missing you may be doing the plain text thing and that would probably see the indents disappear.

Yes, I get the font and "paragraph" (rather than body text). Any further thoughts on why my first line indents come through?

You could try changing Options> Composition > general to deselect the Use paragraph format. It might have something to do with the different way the two styles treat paragraphs.

If you want to test without changing the setting, just select a few lines in an email you are composing, change the paragraph to body and then paste into the middle of the text area you changed to body.

Thank you! This appears to have solved the problem.