Why is Outlook so Ridiculous?

[Petex]

Hi folks

An hour of messing about with MS forums and cannot even get in. So I'll try here.

Is there any way to set up the outlook paragraph spacing so that it is not ridiculous? The developers must have been stoned.

I'd love to ask MS this question but they've cleverly made it almost impossible to do so. All I see is complicated procedures that don't work anyway.

Is there any known explanation for why MS destroyed Outlook? I used to like it.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

The problem isn't so much outlook but in how web browsers render html paragraph tags. When you hit Enter, Outlook treats it as a paragraph and wraps it in HTML code for paragraph. Most people press enter twice at the end of a para so it has white space in either plain text or html.

So the raw HTML looks like this:
<p>Test</p>
<p></p>
<p>more stuff</p>
<p></p>

Browsers render paragraphs with extra spacing and the extra set of P tags creates more white space then desired.

Now... in addition to using tags, Outlook also adds CSS to control the layout. Outlook puts the CSS styles at the beginning of the HTML and adds it to the html tag as a class: <p class="mso">Test</p>. Most desktop clients and some web clients (yahoo, outlook.com) can read the CSS and properly render it, resulting in normal spacing.

But some browsers/mail services only support inline CSS. They only use <p style="line-spacing 12pt">Test</p> CSS formats, not <p class="mso">Test</p>. This is why you have double spacing - and you should only have it in web mail.

If you are using stationery, switch back to no stationery and see if it helps. Using Shift+Enter to enter line breaks, not Enter for paragraphs will fix it, as will using one Enter (but it looks bad on apple devices). I have more information at http://www.slipstick.com/problems/messages-are-double-spaced/, along with additional possible solutions.

 

[Petex]

Sorry Diane I missed this reply for a while. Many thanks. Great advice. I'll check out the link. If shift-enter works I'll be annoyed that nobody mentioned this to me before.