[Mailman-Users] Email formatting

[Robert Heller]

At Fri, 10 Oct 2014 16:39:33 +0000 (UTC) Shannon Doane <s_doane at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> 
> That makes a lot of sense. I'll create the email in plain text and send it
> through to the email list that way and see how things go. 
> 
> I wouldn't have thought simple line breaks would have been that difficult to
> translate from html to plain text.

It depends alot on how the composer and the html generator work -- whether the
composer actually carries over line breaks litterally or if it 'reflows' the
text (eg creates a single 'physical' line inside a <p>...</p> tag). And how
much the generated html depends on style attributes. When converting from html
to plain text, things like style attributes can simply be dropped, etc. Also
the original line breaks might be already gone. I guess this is part of what
defines a "particularly bad" HTML => plain text translator... :-) Ultimately,
it is all the 'victim' of a bad WYSIWYG editor, in that what you see is not
really what you get, but some kind of approximation that is implemented in a
'lossey' way (some of the original information is lost).

If you set the composer to compose plain text, many of the issues of the bad 
WYSIWYG editor are avoided.

> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>
> To: mailman-users at python.org 
> Sent: Friday, October 10, 2014 12:06 PM
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Email formatting
> 
> 
> On 10/10/2014 07:25 AM, Shannon Doane wrote:
> > 
> > I've noticed that when I send an email through the mailing list that a lot of formatting is stripped away. Particularly bothersome is lost line or paragraph breaks. As an example, in an original email there may be a space between paragraphs, but when the email gets delivered through mailman those line breaks may be removed and there is no space between paragraphs at all. Even worse line/paragraph breaks may be removed altogether and everything runs on a continuous line with only word wrap occurring. 
> > Any thoughts on why this happens? 
> 
> 
> There are two things involved here: Mailman's content filtering and your
> mail client.
> 
> In the case of your post to the mailman-users list to which I'm
> replying, you will note that your original was just two lines, but my
> reply is better formatted.
> 
> When you send a message, you compose it in Yahoo's "rich text" editor.
> When you send it, Yahoo sends it as a multipart/alternative message with
> text/plain and text/html alternative parts. The text/html part is HTML
> which renders (at least approximately depending on the recipient's mail
> client) like what you composed with all the formatting, fonts, etc
> intact. The text/plain part is Yahoo's translation of what you composed
> into plain text. Yahoo's web mail is particularly bad at this.
> 
> Then, this list is configured to not send out HTML, so it selects the
> text/plain alternative to send to the members, and the result is Yahoo's
> bad plain text rendering of your composition.
> 
> The answer is to compose your mail in plain text rather than rich text
> to begin with when posting to lists. Then you control what the plain
> text looks like. To do this, click the '<<' icon at the bottom rigjht of
> the composition window to 'Switch to Plain Text'. Then, you can type
> what you want to see; it will be sent as plain text, and Mailman will
> send it as received.
> 

-- 
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