simple formatting possibilities

Greg Marks gtmarks at gmail.com
Sun Aug 30 19:25:31 UTC 2020


Dear Ms. Peck,

I feel your pain.  Last week I was sent the lovely slides from a
presentation by an administrator at my university.  They were sent as an
e-mail attachment in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007+ format, a 17,738,899-byte
attachment.  I found that running doc2pdf followed by pdftotext reduced
it to a 5592-byte text file (with no loss of information).

And if you found your colleagues resistant to editing HTML, try getting
them to use e-mail encryption.  Hilarious experience.

I suppose it would solve the OP's problem if there were some e-mail
protocol that allowed the sender to specify that the e-mail should be
displayed using the default fixed-width font on the recipient's computer
(maybe something akin to including an "AddType text/plain" directive in
the .htaccess file on an Apache Web server).  I notice the Thunderbird
preferences include options "Allow messages to use other fonts" and
"Use fixed width font for plain text messages."  So it seems that even
on this relatively good e-mail client, the user has to opt in to read
messages in Courier 10 font or similar.

Best regards,
Greg Marks

> Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2020 19:32:03 -0600
> From: Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com>
> To: mutt-users at mutt.org
> Subject: Re: simple formatting possibilities
> Message-ID: <20200830013203.GH2291 at shallowsky.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> Derek Martin writes:
> > Your only option for this which would have widespread support would
> > be HTML.  It is *possible* to generate such messages and send them
> > with Mutt.  It's just not very easy or user-friendly.
> 
> I agree (and the thread you reference is very worthwhile reading).
> But be warned that people who are used to doing everything in Word
> documents might not be as amenable to HTML as you might think.
> 
> I mean, Gmail (as well as local mailers like Thunderbird and Apple
> Mail) give you an HTML editor, so that should be a no-brainer,
> right? Right?
> 
> But a while back, I tried to get some people in a nonprofit I work
> with to accept meeting minutes in HTML rather than Word -- and it
> was a complete disaster. None of them could figure out how to edit
> the HTML file, even when it was sent inline in HTML format.
> I think the blockquotes used for quoting was messing them up.
> Or something. It's not like you can get them to explain why they're
> freaking out and saying "HOW DO I ADD MY COMMENTS?!!"
> 
> Hopefully your (the original poster's) experience will be better
> than mine. It's crazy that in 2020, there's no simple rich-text
> format that non-technical users on every platform can edit; but
> that seems to be the state of things.
> 
> One possibility (this didn't work for my group, but maybe with
> enough pushing, it could) is using some sort of WYSIWYG online
> collaborative editor like Google Docs (or an open-source alternative).
> You could probably set up your tables there and people could edit them.
> 
>         ...Akkana
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