PSGCNJ TECH TIP

Why is the formatting always screwed up in the messages forwarded by the Yahoo Group?

The Yahoo Groups service (and Yahoo Mail in general) doesn’t honor the formatting codes used by many programs, especially from the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook.  This is one of many quirks that people would like them to stop being so stubborn about (just as there are in Microsoft software).

This is usually just a nuisance, most obvious in that each blank line is multiplied into two blank lines, and forwarded messages from other Yahoo Groups can then show four or more blank lines where there was only one in the original message.

If this bothers you, you can manually post your message to the Yahoo Group using the “Start Topic” button (located at the right edge just above or below listed messages), and then immediately press the link there for using the Rich-Text Editor (Beta).  That will enable you to edit the fonts and layouts of your message before sending it.

With this Rich-Text message method you can even embed and resize a graphic image, but that image must exist somewhere on the web already.

  • Right-click on that source web image, choose Copy from the popup menu, then go back to your message and paste the image there (using Ctrl-V or right-click >> Paste).  (This creates a virtual image – it appears in your message, but isn’t actually attached into your message.) 

  • Then, to avoid the risk of wild resizing, use this procedure:  Manually resize it (grab a corner & resize it in both dimensions).  Check “View HTML Source”, edit out any “style=” parameter (including quoted values for width &/or height in px), and edit in or correct height and width parameters after the “<IMG ” (e.g., you might start that code with <IMG height="99" width="99" ... using own size preferences for the 99’s).  Visually check the look in Preview and go back repeatedly to manually adjust those figures until it looks okay.

Before you submit your message to be distributed to everyone, you’ll usually want to use the Preview button to see how it will look, and then use either the Send or Edit button.

Professional Service Group of Central New Jersey
at Somerville (PSGCNJ)
75 Veterans Memorial Drive East
Somerville, NJ 08876
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