* Senders don’t always have control over appearance of e-mail to recipients
Recently one of my staff sent me a draft memorandum to be sent to recipients by e-mail. She went to a lot of trouble to format her message nicely, with tab characters in lines of text designed to create a table of information that would be easy to read.
What never occurred to her – and to many other users of e-mail – is that the sender of e-mail, like the creator of a Web page, has almost no control over the appearance or format of her message on the recipient’s computer screen or printer.
When my colleague’s message reached me, my e-mail client followed the settings I had given it: convert all HTML e-mail to straight text and strip out extra line breaks (i.e., convert sequences of line breaks to no more than two). In addition, the program displayed the text e-mail in my choice of font, not the sender’s.
The result was that her nicely formatted table ended up disintegrated into a jumble of misaligned text that was harder to read than if it had been planned for generalized representation in the first place. For example, the information could have been formatted using commas, semicolons, slashes or just line breaks that would be readable and useful in any format.
Similarly, Web browsers have options that specify a user’s preferred mode of representation, including fonts and point sizes used for headers, background colors and size of pages. They allow a user to use – or to ignore – the settings defined by the creator of the Web page or other HTML document. This end-user power does not mean that it’s pointless trying to format your Web page nicely, but it does imply that you should check its appearance in plain text and especially in proportional vs. non-proportional typefaces.
Going back to e-mail, senders should remember that many people refuse to interpret HTML e-mail on security grounds. HTML can execute unwanted operations; for example, “Web beacons” are single-pixel images used for tracking Web activity. Opening an HTML e-mail message with such a pointer to such an external, invisible image increments a counter and, depending on how the URL is constructed, may transmit precise information about exactly who is reading that particular e-mail and when. Not everyone is happy with that function.
I think that for professional use, it is wise to ensure that one’s message will be effective for all recipients. As a matter of course, I would define office policy on e-mail to require all users to set their e-mail clients to send plain-ASCII e-mail as the default case. If a special case does require formatted e-mail, the individual message can be set to HTML mode.
Microsoft Word DOC files are not a good solution for sending platform-independent materials that you want your recipients to see exactly as you intended. The DOC file depends on exactly which fonts are loaded on your recipient’s machine; although there is a font-conversion table in MS-Word, the conversion is sometimes only approximate. Carefully formatted materials can thus appear very different on the recipient’s machine than on the sender’s. The same problem occurs with Rich Text Format files. In addition, some highly security-sensitive recipients simply flatly refuse DOC attachments, so keep that in mind when you are trying to send formatted information to strangers.
Acrobat PDF files have become a de facto standard for sending materials to recipients with sender-controllable output formatting. You can use the full Acrobat product from Adobe, transform output from the open source TeX program, and use low-cost alternatives such as Pdf995 to produce PDF files. I use PDF files every week to send student notes created in PowerPoint to the Norwich University print services; they offer many advantages over the limited print options available in PowerPoint itself. Just as an example, I routinely use Acrobat to produce printouts with nine slides per page that use all of the surface of the sheets instead of the shrunken images available using PowerPoint.
So remember this: the output format of your e-mail is out of your control unless you _take_ control.
