[From Bruce Abbott (2007.02.13.1140 EST)] --
Richard Kennaway (2007.02.13.1552 GMT)
[Martin Taylor 2007.02.13.10.33]
I don't know how these messages look on your screens, but on mine,
they are a mixture of minuscule and microscopic typefaces, with
absolutely no indication of which section belongs with which
original message, no ">" ">>" etc indications, and no way of knowing
wheich bit is written by which author.
I manage to read the message by pretending to be sending a response,
and magnifying the text from "normal" to "bigger" (not "big"; that's
still mostly illegible, at least for some sections).
There must be some way you can send your messages that allows for
nested quoting, and that uses typefaces larger than 3 pixels high?
Maybe one can see it when using a PC to read the messages, and this
is yet another way that Microsoft has chosen to make life difficult
for Mac users, but if it's something you authors can do something
about, please do!
Messages from Bill and Bruce never used to be like this. Only from
Bjorn did I have a problem until relatively recently.
The problem results from using an email program that sends email as
HTML documents. This is evil and should never be done. Bjorn's
email is even worse, as his mailer is formatting the mail with
Microsoft Word and then mashing that into HTML, producing emails ten
times as large as plain text would be and less readable.
There is a standard method, as old as email, for indicating quotes by
">" signs in the left margin, and all proper emailers support it.
Microsoft Outlook, unless told otherwise, ignores this standard
totally, and instead formats the message in multiple font sizes and
colours, with no other indication at all of who said what. Anyone
reading the messages with non-Microsoft software is likely to see, at
best, plain unformatted text without quote indications, and at worst,
what Martin describes.
Whether the emailer is Outlook or not, there should be a preferences
setting somewhere to turn off fancy formatting. This needs to be
turned off. The one true way of email is plain text.
I'm glad that you and Martin mentioned this; I had no idea that Macs
formatted HTML code from Outlook in this way. What I was trying to do was to
find a good way to distinguish the quoted parties with a program (Outlook)
that does not appear to have the option of using the standard method that
you describe, and which I used when I still had Eudora.
I recommend Eudora as an alternative to Outlook.
The PC version of Eudora changed some years ago so that quoted material
would be indicated by a vertical line along the left margin rather than the
traditional ">" character. [But perhaps there is a way to produce this that
I did not discover when I was using the program.] Outlook does have the
option to use text rather than HTML, and I am using that here.
It's not quite the same, but does my use in this message of the ">" at the
beginning of each quoted paragraph adequately serve the purpose? Adding ">"
to the front of each line does not work well because automatic line-feeds
may change the formatting and leave the ">" marks buried inside the
paragraphs.
I would think that HTML code would be rendered similarly across platforms;
otherwise wouldn't you have trouble reading web pages -- most created on PCs
-- with your Mac? So I'm puzzled why you get a different font size. (I was
using a rather standard 12-point font.)
Bruce A.