Traditional grid system

One of the monthly invoices I get by email (from those nice people at VoIPtalk) starts with:

Please view this with a fixed-width font.

And indeed, all the columns line up much more tidily if you do that, but come on, chaps, times have moved on! Even people like me are no longer using Pine to read their email, and you can bet that the vast majority of your customers won’t even know how to set their email reader into a fixed-width font.

Ironically, if you want people to view your message in Courier nowadays, you probably need to send it as HTML!

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2 Comments

Hi Quentin,

Aah, that wonderful smell of Pine… You could copy and paste the email text into a text editor such as Notepad on a Windows PC, or your favourite text editor. BTW, what text editor do you recommend for the Mac, that just edits text and doesn’t try and be too clever. I have trouble with Apple’s offering in that respect

John

    I’m a fan of TextMate, which can be as simple or as clever as you want it to be. It costs €48, but is worth it if text editing, and particularly coding, is a big part of your life. I bought it a long time ago and have definitely got my money’s worth out of it.

    If you don’t want to pay for an editor, then TextWrangler is good, and I think it’s still free. It’s the ‘lite’ version of BBEdit, which weighs in at $125.

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