safe text

[Joe Crump]

Hey, It's not Microsoft's fault! If anything it helped on two sides of the
issue.
First, Microsoft Word put everything you asked on the clipboard! Word 2000
puts
the text of the message, a metafile image of the text, the ability for you
to paste
an embedded of linked object of Word into an OLE application, and RTF & HTML
versions
of the document. It would be pretty lame if Word only copied the text to
the clipboard (e.g. most people want their formatting, bold, underline, etc,
to persist with copy-paste operations). Your mail client, apparently
preferred
HTML over text when multiple formats were available and sent it as you
asked.
Second, even though it was sent HTML, users of Microsoft Outlook 2000 (like
myself)
say your message fine (because it recognized the format as HTML and
displayed
it as such). But of course, some mail clients do not.

Btw: What I always do to get rid of excess formatting, is copy whatever I
want
to the clipboard, __paste it into Notepad.exe then copy it back to the
clipboard__.
That way, when you paste the result into your target application you can be
sure
the clipboard only contains the plain text version. :)

- Joe

-----Original Message-----
From: Marc LeBrun [mailto:mlb at well.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2000 9:24 AM
To: seqfan at ext.jussieu.fr
Subject: safe text


Someone pointed out that my previous long message contained junk
characters, etc.  My apologies! I'm aware that I'm trying everyone's
patience enough without tormenting them with such noise!  Here's my reply
to this individual:

=====

Good grief, many apologies!  I really had no idea there was junk in that
message.  In fact, I tried very very hard to make sure it was completely
vanilla!  In fact, it was your good example that I wanted to emulate!

The procedure I used was that I first prepared it in Microsoft Word
(because I use the fancy search & replace, macros, etc).  But I wrote it
all in a fixed-width font, using an 80-character wide ruler that I moved
around by manual cut and paste to keep an eye on the line widths.  Then I
pasted the entire Word text into Eudora, looked it over carefully and made
a few edits.  I even went so far as to remove tab characters and leading
spaces on lines, etc, because sometimes they cause funny things to happen.

I also would never knowingly send a bunch of HTML to a general audience.
At most a URL.

Despite all these efforts some software still managed to insert poop into
my message (thanks, Microsoft).  Again, many apologies for the annoyance.
I'll redouble my efforts to send clear ASCII henceforth!

=====

If anyone has any tips on ensuring "safe text", I'd like to hear them...

Thanks!