Hello Allie,
Tuesday, May 25, 2004, 9:18:30 PM, you wrote:
AM> You'll need to send an example for one of us to examine. Maybe it's
AM> being altered in some way or you're making an error.
AM> If you're using MicroEd you shouldn't be getting all that extra code
AM> that you say that you're seeing.
Well, I finally figured it out thanks to the help of this list. I have to say,
however, that it is "bassackward". Here is what I learned, and I'm posting this
for the next poor fool that is trying to accomplish what I wanted. And I would
remind all of those reading that what I originally wanted was a template for
mass mailing that would be viewed in HTML.
1. It cannot be done if you set your editor preferences to use the html editor.
2. You must use the MicroEd editor.
3. You have to hard code the html code in the message or template. When you save
or send the message it is apparently automatically converted to the format I
wanted. In other words, it looks pretty. If you have set your editor preferences
for viewing to see both html and text, you will actually see the message in both
formats and it looks clean.
4. The process is not intuitive, because after you have created the message, you
see the html codes and only through the intervention of this list would I have
seen this through. It didn't make sense to me that you could have an html (and
template) editor that you couldn't use for creating html.
5. Once you have saved the email as a draft or put the email into the outbox,
YOU CANNOT REOPEN OR YOU LOSE FORMATTING. As best I can tell, once you reopen
it, some sort of automatic conversion takes place and the html code is changed
to a more extensive set of options. The source that originally had only the
simple HTML and BODY tags looks (at the beginning) like the following:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE></TITLE>
<STYLE type="text/css"><!--
BODY {
margin: 5px 5px 5px 5px;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
}
6. In my particular case, when I saved and reopened, the font became one point
larger and the paragraph returns </p> disappeared. I could have changed the
message format to microed and re inserted the html code, but elected not to.
7. That's about it. I would add that I think more thought needs to be given to
the template editor by The Bat programmers. If you are going to provide the
ability to edit in html, then you should be able to write templates in html
without having to hard code. I would also think that losing the formatting and
html code when you reopen a draft and change it is a bug. Of course, if the
reply address had not lost its url when I used a template, I wouldn't have had
to go through this process.
The good news is I will be able to accomplish my goal. I was just getting ready
to spring for PocoMail, when this finally clicked and I was able to make it
work. As an aside, the PocoMail appearance is very pretty and feature rich in a
lot of areas, but I quickly discovered that in order to write a template that
does more than include a few fields from the address book, you have to learn the
scripting language. And forget about importing all of your address book. You
can get about 9 fields imported, but to get the rest of the fields, you have to
learn their scripting language. Of course, importing into The Bat address book
is not much better. In order to get fields like prefix and suffix (which are
reversed) and gender, I have to import and then export as a vcf file and then
run a laborious vba macro in excel (which was easiest for me) that inserts
gender and then copy all of the text into a text editor, save it and reimport as
a vcf file. You can't save it in excel because it somehow screws up the vcf
file.
Ok, I'm rattling, but this has taken most of my day and I'm punch drunk. In
retrospect, I can see why some of the more experienced users probably thought I
was playing with half a deck. That may be true, but this was not a particularly
intuitive process.
Thanks again to all and especially to Leif, who had the patience to stay with
me.
--
Thanks again for your help!
Rusty
P.S. I hope the separator is working.
________________________________________________
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