Your boss wants you to format text without using the world's most compatible and widely used formatting language??
...which should never, ever have been added to email.
Good point :)
This is offtopic, but let's be honest, HTML is a lousy formatting language, and adding it to email caused all kinds of problems, from myriad security issues that never existed before, to enabling spammers to keep track of who is reading their nocturnal emissions.
Any company that, as a policy, wants to ban HTML mail is okay by me.
I agree 100%, my beef was with wanting bold etc without using html or other ML.
So. Text formatting options.
* Use Perl's built-in functionality. This article takes a look at how this is done today with Perl5, and how it will be done in the future with Perl6:
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/02/27/exegesis7.html>
* Use the Text::Template module, if it isn't overkill:
<http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-Template/lib/Text/Template.pm>
These approaches can handle basic table layouts, but not text styling: boldface, italics, etc. *But*, some people can _make do_ /without/ that with text tricks that approximate *bold*, /italics/, and _underlining_. (I think Word will even take that and apply the actual styles, but I don't use Word because of such "helpful" things. Some people like it.)
Good ideas! In my experience most bosses/users are to clueless to use even such a simple Markup language as the */ and _
If you really need that kind of formatting, consider using either attachments (a good PDF will look better than HTML anyway, but you can
I think the document sharing idea is probably the way to go, generate a pdf and email it as an aattachment, then it can look as pretty as you want, will look the exact same for everyone, *and* some mail clients will display pdfs inline so they may not even need to open it, which would be cool (I think Mozilla's mail client and Mac's Mail do this).
(I do this with certain contracts and legal docs, generate the html for them with their custom content and create a pdf out of that html code with Perl using htmldoc, there are other modules available to make pdf's just never tried them ;p)
also just attach an Office document or whatever) or set up an intranet server where people can post documents and send each other URLs to them.
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