simple formatting possibilities

[Jon LaBadie]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 03:57:04PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
...
> 
> I fear I've mislead the list readers.  I'm not looking to show some
> thing analagous to a bridge game or hand.  Much more basic than that.
> 
> Currently I send out an email with a paragraph or two of text followed
> by lines like:
> 
>    Table 1
> N: Geo Washington (host)
> E: John Adams
> S: Tom Jefferson
> W: James Madison
> 
> Similar lines to those would follow for 6 or 7 tables.  We will now be
> playing 2 sessions each night and I have to double the number of tables.
> It would be nice to be able to do it in 2 columns, like:
> 
>      Table 1                                 Table 1
>   N: Geo Washington (host)                N: Geo Washington (host)
>   E: John Adams                           E: James Monroe
>   S: Tom Jefferson                        S: J.Q. Adams
>   W: James Madison                        W: Andrew Jackson
> 
> 
> You viewing it in mutt inside a terminal window probably see two
> nicely aligned columns.  But readers using thunderbird, outlook,
> etc. would not because of the proportional spacing.
> 
> As I'm asking about something for formatting, I threw on to the
> dream list things like "bold" font.

Not a solution I would use, but I created the above two column
sequence in thunderbird.  I did the two "Table 1" headings as
Bold and Underlined the two words "host".  Then sent it to myself
at several email accounts.

Thunderbird created a 2 part message, text and html.  Those MUA's
that understood html showed fine.  That included mutt and w3m.

Viewing the text section with mutt was good on all but the lines
with font changes.  The "Table 1" line and the Geo Washington
lines were shifted full left (no indentation) and had no spacing
between the two columns.


Thanks for all the input, I'll take any more you have.

Right now I'm thinking of composing in LibreOffice and exporting
to a pdf.  Yes it may require a separate viewing program by the
recipients, but I've more confidence they can view .pdf than .docx.

Jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                 jon at labadie.us
 11226 South Shore Rd.          (703) 787-0688 (H)
 Reston, VA  20190              (703) 935-6720 (C)