About Me
I live in Western Australia, near the water, in the city. I like to wander about. I love my family and friends. I read when I can, write when I can, take photos and hope for the best.
"When, however, I look over the hints and memorandums I have taken down ... my heart almost fails me at finding how my idle humor has led me aside ..."
Washington Irving
'The Author's Account of Himself'
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
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In the Age of the Automobile - and nothing has shaped our culture like the motor car - there have been many great drivers but only one great passenger.
Tom Robbins
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
Sunday, January 21, 2007
E-mail Newsletters - PDF or HTML?
Okay, so I don't normally ask questions of my readers but I'm a bit stuck. If I wanted to create an e-mail newsletter, would it be best to convert a Word/Publisher/whatever document to PDF and insert it into an e-mail, or would it be best to write the e-mail in HTML (maybe using FrontPage) and send it out like that? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method? What about other methods? Accessibility, usability, compatibility, ease-of-composition are what I'd like to consider. Any suggestions? Help most appreciated!
Comments:
PDF means that people can't fiddle with the text of the document unless they have a PDF editor..which most people don't.
I use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft products for my wordprocessing, spreadsheets etc. Does most of what I want to do...and it does .pdf output. It's free and easy to download....the site is here.
Things like Frontpage usually put in heaps of gratuitious and painful extra tags that can be annoying. I'd say stick with the .pdf idea.
I use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft products for my wordprocessing, spreadsheets etc. Does most of what I want to do...and it does .pdf output. It's free and easy to download....the site is here.
Things like Frontpage usually put in heaps of gratuitious and painful extra tags that can be annoying. I'd say stick with the .pdf idea.
# posted by 
: Mon Jan 22, 09:01:00 am AWDT
: Mon Jan 22, 09:01:00 am AWDT
HTML email is a potential security problem: for instance spammers can send you email with one pixel-sized images that download from their site. That way they know you've read the email and that's it's a valid address. For that reason I always turn off html mail. In fact I have a filter that dumps them in the junk folder.
pdf has the problem of size. They can grow quite big and if your mailing list is quite long then you're forever sending out large attachments.
My solution is to create the newsletter as a pdf, and then deposit it on a site that people can download from. Then for each edition you can send out a text email with a link to that edition. It also means that people can go back and check the archives for anything they might of missed or if they've lost it.
pdf has the problem of size. They can grow quite big and if your mailing list is quite long then you're forever sending out large attachments.
My solution is to create the newsletter as a pdf, and then deposit it on a site that people can download from. Then for each edition you can send out a text email with a link to that edition. It also means that people can go back and check the archives for anything they might of missed or if they've lost it.
# posted by : Mon Jan 22, 09:11:00 am AWDT
: Mon Jan 22, 09:11:00 am AWDT
Thanks so much guys! Great to be clued in about PDF vs HTML by some people I trust! Looks like I'll be sticking with the current format (I've inherited the newsletter) and maybe making it smaller in size (both in content and memory). I'd hate to be making life difficult for the recipients, contributors and myself, so I appreciate the feedback!
Hi Andrew,
Hope you enjoyed your time away! Thanks for the feedback. I wouldn't use FrontPage for my own stuff, but work already has it and that's what I'll have to use to edit the Web site (although I can't work out how to look at the code, so maybe not - this is very trying indeed!). We currently write the newsletter in Word and then save it as PDF, which is fine but I need to then edit the PDF so that any hypertext that isn't given as the url will be usable. Aggh! :-)
Bye for now,
Dee
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Hope you enjoyed your time away! Thanks for the feedback. I wouldn't use FrontPage for my own stuff, but work already has it and that's what I'll have to use to edit the Web site (although I can't work out how to look at the code, so maybe not - this is very trying indeed!). We currently write the newsletter in Word and then save it as PDF, which is fine but I need to then edit the PDF so that any hypertext that isn't given as the url will be usable. Aggh! :-)
Bye for now,
Dee
