itsaplane said:
I¡¦m composing a party invitation in Outlook using indented text, text boxes,
and various pasted-in images. I sent this message to my Yahoo email account
and Outlook on another computer ¡V in both cases the invitation is jumbled
with the elements I composed out of place. How can I make sure my invitation
looks the same (the way I composed it) for every recipient?
Note: one suggestion I got was to send my invitation as an Acrobat (*.pdf)
file. That'd work, but some recipients might be hesistant to open a file
attached to an email. How can I put my invitation in the *body* of the email
so all the elements will look the way I composed them?
If you are going to all the trouble of generating an HTML formatted
document, but because you cannot ensure what e-mail client is used by
the recipient or their settings regarding the rendering of HTML, perhaps
you should upload your HTML document to some online storage and give a
URL to that web page. Because recipients may use different web
browsers, and because it is unlikely that you are creating a web site
that will handle multiple versions of your web pages depending on which
web browser is used to view them, make sure to note in your e-mail that
you designed it to render correctly under whatever you happen to use as
your web browser when making the page look right to you.
You might also consider NOT using Word as your HTML editor. Word adds a
lot that isn't HTML at all but is for backward compatibility, tracking
and comments, and other Word-specific garbage that doesn't belong in an
clean HTML document. You cannot guarantee that recipients will use Word
to render your Word-polluted HTML formatted e-mail. See
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+clean++word++html. If you
want your recipients to get clean HTML documents, don't use Word to
create them, or clean the HTML document generated by Word. In OL2002,
you can mitigate some of this by using Tools -> Options -> General ->
Web Options but there will still be a lot of Word-specifics left in the
HTML document generated by Word. Later versions of Word may provide
more options to eliminate Word-specific garbage from HTML documents.
You never mentioned WHICH version of Outlook that you use. Outlook 2007
forces you to use Word when composing e-mails. Prior versions of
Outlook let you decide, so configure Outlook to NOT use Word as your
e-mail editor. If you're stuck using Outlook 2007, and if you want to
ensure you generate HTML files that don't carry along Word-specific
code, then use an HTML editor (there are plenty of free ones found by
Googling) and use that to compose your web page. Then use that HTML
editor's Send By E-mail (so it inserts the HTML document into the body
of your e-mail). Then you have an HTML document that should render okay
at the recipients end -- provided the recipients allow rendering of
HTML-formatted e-mails.
If you don't want to go through all that work to ensure compatibility
and viewing consistently, attach the document to your e-mail. Let the
recipient figure out how to view it.
