Formatting Your Ezine

Formatting Your Ezine
by
windsong

One of the common problems faced by ezine editors is being able
to format their ezine so that it does not get screwed up when
sent out.

So what causes the formatting information to be changed when
your ezine is received by your subscribers?

There are many different email programs and they all interpret
the email text they receive slightly differently. Some email
programs automatically word-wrap lines at a set number of
characters, others do not. Some will use a different character
font and font size from the original text.

The biggest problem an ezine editor faces is trying to
compensate for different font types. A font type determines
how much space a character occupies and how close it is to a
neighbouring character.

Always use monospaced fonts, or fixed fonts. Otherwise, your
text may tend to grow when emailed. In other words the line
gets longer. This effect is caused because these characters,
known as variable fonts, can occupy a different amount of
space making fixed alignment of text very difficult. Fixed
fonts all have the same amount of space.

The next thing to avoid is using tabs to align lines of text.
This will cause you alignment problems. The best way around
this is to always manually insert the number of spaces you
require and the incidents of major formatting problems will
be reduced.

When it comes to line lengths never use lines longer than 65
characters. Email programs will wrap lines at different
lengths but the majority are probably set to wrap at 65. To
control where your lines wrap, always use a hard break. This
forces the email program displaying your text to wrap a line
at that point unless the user has set it to a shorter length.
I prefer to use a line length of 60 characters.

When creating your ezine, always use a text editor such as
notepad. Do not use Word to compose your ezine. You will have
more problems than you want to deal with. It will lose all
formatting when you paste it into the email composition
window.

So to summarize... follow these simple rules:

1. Always use a fixed or monospaced font.

2. Do not use the tab key to align lines of text.

3. Always insert a hard break at the end of each line.

4. Keep your line lengths to a maximum of 65 characters.

5. Always use a simple text editor.

If you follow these rules the majority of your subscribers will
receive your ezine formatted as you intended it.

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