Robert,
Your reply doesn't answer my questions which were in two parts: (1) How do I
get the problems listed directly to the team responsible in Microsoft? - No
answer.
(2) Why are these problems occurring with Outlook 2007, when they didn't
occur in Outlook 2003 or earlier versions? Response: Start using unusual
procedures dependent on some technical knowledge about HTML. This is a
typical technocrat response rather than one related to users who simply want
to use the default interface as it is presented to them without having to
understand the technology behind it.
1. I haven't got my own webserver. Like many ordinary non-technical users I
want to cut images from one document and paste them in another - I had the
facility to do that before. With Outlook 2007 I don't have that same
facility. That facility to download and copy the image was available through
a right mouse click within Outlook 2003. That pop-up menu command is no
longer available in Outlook 2007.
2. If I create a document in MS Word, I expect to be able to select and copy
info from it and be able to paste it into my email and to retain the same
formatting. It appears to do that in Outlook 2007, but when I see the results
received at the other end the formatting has been corrupted. I don't really
care what the HTML 4.0 standard says. The fact is that this didn't happen in
Outlook 2003 and similar email messages were rendered and transmitted
accurately. It's the results that count, and the technology has to be made to
produce the desired results. In my opinion Outlook 2007 is broken compared
with Outlook 2003 because the development team forgot a few essentials.
3. I didn't introduce the "exotic" fonts into Outlook 2007. The Microsoft
Office 2007 development team did that. It was they who decided to make
Cambria and Calibri the default fonts for the user. Ok, I'm not too worried
whether the fonts are substituted, but I do expect the system to replace one
serif font with another, or a sans serif with another sans serif. As far as I
am aware HTML tags allow for font families to be identified and associated
with the text and all the associated properties such as size and style. Also
HTML does allow embedded binary files such as font files, but of course email
readers may decline to read or act on such attachments.
4. The "incorrect" rendering of commercial email messages containing
graphics is not just a problem for me. It is a problem for about 70% of the
companies that want to keep their customers in touch with latest offerings,
as one of the other respondents to my message has confirmed. During the BETA
and CTP trials, Microsoft asked to be sent copies of badly rendered emails
with graphics. I think I sent about 10 a day - but no action seemed to be
taken to correct the problem.
5. I asked in my message if the Microsoft development team were aware of
these problems and whether any fixes were programmed to be in the pipeline. I
didn't get an answer to that question.
6. As a moderately technologically aware user, I can resolve some of these
problems for myself by changing my practices. But the average user upgrading
to Outlook or Office 2007 will be severely disappointed at the shortcomings
of the product compare with previous releases. I can choose to send messages
in RTF rather than HTML to get the paragraph and line spacing correctly
transmitted, but if I insert a table, then, for some inexplicable reason the
table formatting is lost and cells in the same row are converted to
paragraphs following one another vertically!
So I have to choose between two lame formats!
7. The other key shortcoming is that we are still stuck with an email
protocol which is about 30 years past its sell-by-date. The 8-bit character
format causes no end of problems for international communication which
requires accented characters or characters with diacritical markings, and
there is a real problem in getting people to set their alphabet to an
appropriate one for their non-English communications.
Microsoft seems to be pursuing the development of extended XML systems of
coding in other fields such as XAML in design and development, and keep
talking about a new XPS system for documents which will retain the fidelity
of a document regardless of the device and media to and through which it is
transmitted. Email is now by far the medium which is used most for
transmitting documents. As customers and users we expect the software for
creating, transmitting and receving documents to improve with newer releases
rather than degrade the fidelity.
John Tempest
Roady said:
Basically you are already answering yourself as to why the message is being
displayed malformed.
To begin with; font usage. Just like you shouldn't be using exotic font
types on webistes, you shouldn't be using it in email. Embedding fonts in
HTML simply isn't possible. Stick with the standards fonts.
How exactly are you designing your emails? Use <p></p> for paragraphs and
<br /> for a line break. Outlook 2007 reders these correct. To generate this
while composing the message press ENTER for <p></p> and SHIFT+ENTER for a
<br />I guess this also explains your issue with the bitmaps.
Copying and directly pasting images from an email source isn't the way to go
either. Especially with newsletters place the images on your own webserver
and link to its source. To embed the images into your message use Insert->
Picture and browse to the "physical" file.
There are some non-supported HTML features but they don't apply here. To
read up see;
http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/wordhtml.htm
--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
Coauthor, Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
http://www.howto-outlook.com/
Outlook FAQ, HowTo, Downloads, Add-Ins and more
-----
John Tempest said:
[Apologies if this wrongly directed to this group. The "Contact Us" link
in
Outlook 2007 links to Office 2007 Online which then doesn't have any
options
to report a bug or express a wish for a new feature.] [This messsage
refers
to Office 2007 running on Windows Vista Ultimate]
But the HTML rendering in Outlook 2007 is screwed up compared with its
operation in Outlook 2003 and earlier versions, and has been so since the
first public beta. Multi-sectioned bitmap images are not correctly joined
up
when rendered leaving gaps between the parts.
Paragraphs with one line space between them have extra "breaks" inserted
extending perfectly formatted text into 3 times ints original length.
The Calibri font is converted to a serif-ed font (why introduce fonts
which
the world outside Microsoft has no knowledge of? Why isn't font embedded
into
the HTML so it can be properly rendered?). So that if you use Calibri and
Cambria to distinguish different parts of your message, this distinction
is
lost in the rendered version before transmission.
Copying images from other emails only results in copying the URLs (there
is
no option to do otherwise) which are then screened out by the security
sub-systems of the receiving system. The only way to ensure that images in
your email are embedded in the message and then received properly is to
copy
the image into MS Word and then copy it back as an image into Outlook
2007!
Are these issues known by Microsoft, and are they being dealt with to
appear
in some future Office 2007 update?
REPLY> John,
