e-mail problems

[Northumbrian]

What is responsible for laying down the rules for e-mail e.g. line length, spacing between lines, etc? Does erasing and altering affect these settings? I can type a perfectly laid out letter, send it, but when I print a copy there are large gaps between words, shortened lines and, quite often, double spacing between lines. I have XP Pro, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and my printer is a Canon MP460 Can any of these be the guilty party or might I have, in my ignorance, altered the settings somewhere along the line?

[rojash]

The only true rule for e-mails is that they are pure text - i.e. no formatting, no layout, nowt. A bit like this answer.

Everything else is a kludge layed on top of the original standard. Which is to say, that if you create a formatted e-mail, or attach something, this is encoded into pure text (with an indicator to say that it has been encoded). How this is then decoded (or even if it is) is entirely up to the receiving client (and some user configurable options in some clients).

If you wish to send something in which the formatting is essential, your best option is to create it in a word processor, convert to pdf and send it as an attachment.

[VHG]

I think the only "rules" plain text follows is if you press "enter" at the end of a line to go to a new line.

It will preserve that line break.

If you notice in Outlook, if you keep typing the text keeps going to the right of the window then "word wraps", but if you widen or narrow the window the text will reflow.

If you want to be certain text finished at a certain point you need to press enter and force a line break.

[VHG]

One other thing, a email can be written in "plan text" or in HTML format.

Make sure your email system is set to "plain text" and I think it will only preserve line breaks.

The other thing to consider may be the font you use.

Some fonts are monospaced, meaning every letter (and blank space) take up the same amount of space.

But other fonts can use more space for one letter (say an "m") than another (say an "i").

It may be that you are WRITING the letter in one font, but it is printing in another font, which effects the flow.

I am not sure if that is even possible, but I am just trying to think of things that may be causing your problem.

[Northumbrian]

My thanks to you both. I only wish I had asked the question 5 years ago and had received the answers then.