I got a great question about formatting email from one of my favorite faculty today, who always reminds me that when I assume that something’s common knowledge, it’s time to check my perceptions.
John, if I want to send an email, say to students in one of my classes, and I want it to have different formatting and graphics (different font sizes, different fonts, a picture, an email link, etc.), is there a way of ensuring that they all see the same thing, i.e., that their emails will all look the same no matter what email program they’re using? How do I do that, if it’s possible?
The only way to ensure that everyone sees that same thing is to make a picture of what you want them to see, and then send the picture.
Everyone has:
- different fonts installed, so that if you use whatever.ttf and I don’t have it, I’ll see something else
- different monitor capabilities, so that if you want the color red to appear an inch down the page, but I have a very low resolution setting, it may appear 3 inches down
- different default font setting in email, so that if you don’t specify a font, and your default is times new roman.ttf, but my default is everclear.ttf, we will see something different
- different email and HTML rendering capabilities, so that for instance, some might see bullet points to the left here, and others might not, and so on.
- Some might see this line blinking, and others won’t, due to differences in rendering engines.
You could approximate some level of continuity using something like an attached PDF if you wanted to retain the capability of users selecting text, for instance. But without a picture, you’re leaving everything to chance.
Hope this helps.
