Message Appearance For Outlook Recipients

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Level 4

1,374 points

Message Appearance For Outlook Recipients

Hello All,

When you send a standard textual email in rich text format from Mail.app to a recipient that uses Outlook on Windows, the recipient sees the text of the message in whatever their default message font is. Mail.app doesn't send the message with the font information you have set in preferences. So whereas most output from your Mac looks beautiful to a Windows user, your email messages look primitive if the Outlook user hasn't changed their default settings.

The workaround seems to be to set your message font preference to something you would never wish to send and then change the font to something you do wish the recipient to see and make sure you choose a font that a typical Windows user would have installed (or at least a close approximation to it).

This is tedious, time consuming and gets very irritating after you do it a few times.

Is there some way I could automate this to make it quicker?

Is there some way I could fix it so it doesn't happen at all and I don't have to think about it?

Is there somewhere I can read about "Windows Outlook safe fonts" i.e. ones that will render close to what you see on a Mac instead of getting converted to the default font in Outlook?

I wouldn't normally care too much about this but I'm trying to ditch my Windows PC and start using a Mac for work. Most of my recipients use Outlook.

Many thanks

Message was edited by: IanB

13" MacBook Pro, 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.1), iPhone 2.1, Wintel XP Laptop

Posted on Nov 6, 2009 2:47 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 6, 2009 6:17 AM in response to IanB

You're blaming Mail for something that you have no control over. Whatever the recipient has set for their default font will be the one displayed for any email, regardless of the operating system, unless the recipient has the same font(s) installed and active that you used to compose the message.

It's always been this way, so wasting your time trying to achieve something that isn't possible is pointless.

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Answer 2

direwolf8

Level 4

1,286 points

Nov 6, 2009 10:21 AM in response to IanB

Send a PDF with embedded fonts and it will look very much like you intended.

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Answer 3

IanB Author

Level 4

1,374 points

Nov 6, 2009 12:13 PM in response to direwolf8

direwolf8,

Thank you for your constructive suggestion. I'm really after a way to get Mail to encode the font spec in standard text with a faster, simpler or preferably automatic way than the method I use now.

Thanks again,

Ian

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Answer 4

Nov 10, 2009 9:07 AM in response to Golden Shoes

Golden Shoes wrote:
You're blaming Mail for something that you have no control over. Whatever the recipient has set for their default font will be the one displayed for any email, regardless of the operating system, unless the recipient has the same font(s) installed and active that you used to compose the message.

It's always been this way, so wasting your time trying to achieve something that isn't possible is pointless.

Ah, but as many software engineers I know often say "anything is possible in software"

Try looking at it this way: many Mac users are barely tolerated in companies that are Microsoft centric. Snow Leopard was an incredible advance for those of us who prefer to use a Mac but need to coexist with Windows users (and especially with Microsoft Exchange).

Since Snow Leopard is heavily advertised by Apple for it's Exchange support (see http://www.apple.com/macosx/exchange/), I, and many other users, assumed that messages will look the same regardless of platform (at least if we're using default fonts that are common on both operating systems). This is after all how it works with Word documents, Excel, etc. etc.

Nowhere that I can find in Apple's description of Mail's Exchange support does it say "except for fonts"

I'd be happy to buy a font if necessary; just want emails sent from Mail to look like emails sent from Outlook. That, to me, is Exchange support....

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Answer 5

Nov 10, 2009 9:21 AM in response to Granite Apple

I, and many other users, assumed that messages will look the same regardless of platform

That's a misguided assumption.

This is after all how it works with Word documents, Excel, etc. etc.

No, it doesn't work that way at all, unless you and the recipient of your email have chosen the same fonts to be active on your respective systems. Without those conditions being true, then you and the recipient of your email will never see the same thing. Word and Excel files don't work that way, either, and they never have.

Nowhere that I can find in Apple's description of Mail's Exchange support does it say "except for fonts"

It doesn't say this or even imply it. Exchange Support means that you can send and receive from your Exchange account. Fonts are not a part of that equation, since the selection of fonts used to display mail is an individual choice. You can't make a font be used that isn't chosen or that you don't have installed.

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Answer 6

IanB Author

Level 4

1,374 points

Nov 27, 2009 2:29 AM in response to IanB

Just in case it helps anyone else.

There is a third party utility called TextExpander ( http://www.smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/index.html) that works similarly to Snow Leopard's text substitution except that it can put in formatted text. This just allows me to start an email with a little abbreviation and start the adjustment to formatted text.

It's also handy for getting your signature immediately below your reply instead at the end of the email trail.

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