Getting Text Emails Displayed as Intended

It is true that the email display is different when we use different software. As with websites, the final display always differs. However, it remains the intention of every email sender that the final display maintains the original shape as such. Hence ,the following tips can help in this direction.

While discussing the tip, we will do so in relation to the problems that occur with the display of text only newsletters

• Line lengths.

Most of the Email software produces broken lines of text in inconvenient places, and in a very unexpected manner. As a result, your carefully written newsletter can appear with half a line or sentence in one Para and its other half in the following Para, which disturbs flow of the matter.

The solution is to keep lines short and add hard returns at the end of each one. There is a consensus that restricting each line to around 70 characters offers the greatest protection from such formatting and layout problems. Hence, the editing software can beset to do a sentence of 70 characters with hard returns at the end of each one.

When mailing software is unable to do this, you can simply adjust the margins of your text editor so the lines wrap at 70 characters. In addition, when you are done, run the cursor or mouse down the side of the page and hit the enter button at the start of every line not already preceded by a hard return.

• Links

However, while doing the above the links of the URLwhich you may like to provide in the news letter do not always get accommodated within the wrapped up 70 characters. Hence, we see a broken link text, which may not click properly.

Therefore, to ensure that the URL link does not break, it is advisable to do the following

• All URLs are written in full, for example http://www.allinallcom/ and not www.allinall.com

• Leave space before and after the linkURL.

Putting URLs within the brackets may also not help.

The best way is to put a shorter link URL which when clicked can take the reader to the actual link, which may be longer. Such redirects do help.

The redirect approach can ensure the click ability of the URL links and it can make your newsletter attractive by giving all the outbound links a consistent look. In addition, you can use your website's visitor statistics to see how many readers clicked on the link.

If you don't want to set up redirect pages yourself, there's commercial software available which will do a similar job

• Odd characters

"Odd" characters are anything outside the standard ASCII character set. Sometimes the email clients are not able to handle these. It therefore pays to create and edit text-only newsletters using a simple text editor. Email clients will then faithfully reproduce any character that you created.

Editing tool like Note Tab, which includes spell checking and various other tools, is very effective. One can write the matter here and then transfer to Word etc. for final editing and formatting.

• Justification

Justification, i.e. the alignment of text on the page, sometimes poses a problem. Many email clients display text messages using a fixed-space font (Courier). This means every space and character takes up the same amount of width. Knowing this, you can center and right justify text using the space bar.

The fixed-space trick also lets people use ASCII characters to create special text effects and graphics, which are called ASCII art. However, some email clients do not recognize these fonts

Therefore the best way is to be careful while justifying your matter, right or center, while avoiding use of ASCII art and you should justify your text, so that it looks possibly original in other fonts as well.