Formatting for "send a message"

[gwillden]

The point was never to have a full-featured rich formatter. When we implemented the formatting in the editor, we made a specific, conscious decision to support some basic formatting but not to try to implement a full-featured editor.

The problem is that the formatting options that the UI provides are not all supported in the email that is generated. For example I tried creating a table with some contents. I set the border color. The border does not show up in the email. That really limits the usefulness of tables in formatting the messages.

[lajackson]

The problem is that the formatting options that the UI provides are not all supported in the email that is generated.

"Basic formatting" means bold, italics, and underline. You can also set a bullitized list. Anything else, including tables, is not simple formatting. It may be stone age stuff, but it is what it is.

[kd7mha]

The problem is that the formatting options that the UI provides are not all supported in the email that is generated.

"Basic formatting" means bold, italics, and underline. You can also set a bullitized list. Anything else, including tables, is not simple formatting. It may be stone age stuff, but it is what it is.

while I would agree, the fact remains that there are table formatting options in the send a message application but that formatting is not sent in the message
the received message has a table but there is no formatting

sent table.jpg

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[gwillden]

The problem is that the formatting options that the UI provides are not all supported in the email that is generated.

"Basic formatting" means bold, italics, and underline. You can also set a bullitized list. Anything else, including tables, is not simple formatting. It may be stone age stuff, but it is what it is.

while I would agree, the fact remains that there are table formatting options in the send a message application but that formatting is not sent in the message
the received message has a table but there is no formatting

Yes. This exactly. The UI allows you to create a table. I'm not talking about copy-pasting a table in. The UI allows you to create a table and set various properties including border color, background color, etc. Those options are not included in the generated email. If the options are not actually supported, then they should be removed from the UI since it gives false hope and leads to even more frustration when a new person spends time trying to format a message to only have it come out very poorly.

Tables are very very helpful. It wouldn't take much to fix the problem. If the backend would simply drop in a <style> tag with the table properties, it would work much better for users.

[Hilohi]

Any chance the formatting can be fixed so that the line breaks in the email that is sent to the members actually appear as how the email was drafted?

[drepouille]

I wonder if the Send a Message app should be changed to send text messages to cell phones, rather than sending email messages. Text messages are usually short, simple, and unformatted.