atw: SEC: UNCLASS Re: HTML email editing problems

From: "Silcock, Howard DR" <Howard.Silcock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Austechwriter (austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)" <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:44:43 +1000

Terry

You really need to tell us what email client you're using and which version.


Because you're dealing with an HTML document, the only way to be sure of
ending up with what you want is to edit it as an HTML document. As far as I
can work out, if you use Outlook 2003, specify HTML format and select Word
as your editor, it generates the HTML for you. (I can't test it here - I'm
using Outlook 2002 at work.) This is necessarily a pretty hit-and-miss
process, mainly because an HTML document's attributes should really be set
up globally - that is, for the entire document - and when you try to make
changes locally it can get messy. The process you describe - saving the
email as a Word document, editing it in Word and then trying to turn it back
again into an HTML document - ought to work if the changes you introduce are
simple enough for Word not to mangle things when it converts it back to
HTML, but that's where the problems are likely to arise.

If you're game to play with HTML code and know even a little bit about how
it works, you can save the email as an HTML document, open it with a text
editor like Notepad or Wordpad and hunt for the text you want to change
among the HTML tags. If you can make your changes without messing up the
tags - or if you know enough about HTML to achieve the result you want by
introducing extra tags - you may be able to produce a reasonable
approximation to the amended document you were aiming for. (I suppose
another possibility might be to use a WYSIWYG editor like FrontPage or
DreamWeaver but you again risk losing control of the detail.)

But then how do you get it back into an email that you can forward? Well,
this again depends on what email client you use. I have only done this with
Outlook. In that case, you open a new email, click where you would normally
type the body of the email and select Insert | File, then in the dialog box
browse to the file you've been editing but instead of clicking the Insert
button, click the down-pointing triangle on the right of the Insert button
and select Insert as Text from the dropdown. 

You'll find that the header information from the original email will be
included at the top of the body of this new email, but you should be able to
remove it manually without messing up the email too much.

I suppose whether you're willing to go through all that will depend on how
keen you are to produce an email that looks the way you want it to!

Best of luck

Howard






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atw: SEC: UNCLASS Re: HTML email editing problems

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