Although we tend to use our email programs as a word processor for composing messages, there are differences in how email programs, such as Mulberry, handle things like tabs and line wrapping. There are also a few things to watch out for when copying and pasting text between Mulberry a more powerful word processor application such as Microsoft Word.
As you compose your message, Mulberry wraps the lines to your window width - just like your word processor does. That's roughly where the lines will break when the message is sent, depending on how wide your draft windows is.
However, when you send your message, Mulberry inserts hard returns so that each line is no longer than 72 characters. If you've made your message draft window wider than 72 characters, Mulberry will wrap your lines to the shorter 72-character length when the message is sent. Wrapping lines shorter than your window width shouldn't cause problems for regular paragraphs of text, but if you've aligned some information in columns and/or used a return character at the end of each line this could cause the lines to reformat in a way you might not prefer.
To find out how wide your draft window is you can type 0123456789's until you reach the right edge of the window. Or, copy the 72 digits below and paste them into your draft window.
012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678912
If you adjust your window to 72 characters wide and then choose "Set Default Window" from the Windows menu you'd then have your draft window synchronized with how Mulberry will hard wrap the lines when the message is sent.
When we use tabs and space characters in our word processors we expect the spacebar to insert a one character "space" and the tab key to make the text jump to the next tab stop (usually every 1/2 inch in most word processors). Tabs don't work quite the same way in email programs and each email program handles them somewhat differently.
Mulberry can either treat a tab as just a space character (but it will remain a tab character when the message is sent) or when you press the tab key it can substitute enough space characters to move your text to the next tab stop (every 8 characters by default). By inserting spaces instead of keeping the tab character, Mulberry better ensures that the people reading your messages will see your text lined up the way you intended.
Many UMD folks may still have their Mulberry preferences set to treat tabs as a single space. New Mulberry users (as of mid-Fall, 2002) and those who've had their preferences started over again to fix a Mulberry problem now have their preferences set to substitute spaces for tabs. You can change this settings by going to File:Preferences->Advanced:Outgoing:Options and checking the "Use Spaces Instead of Tabs" option. To change the tab setting from 8 spaces to some other number, use File:Preferences->Advanced:Outgoing:General.
If you're copying and pasting in text (or bringing a text file in through File:Import Text) then the tabs will still be tabs characters and will take up only a single space (but be sent as tabs). This means it won't work very well to line up text with tabs in your word rocessor and have them displayed properly when you paste or import the text into Mulberry. When you send the message, the person receiving it (depending on what email program they use) may have the tabs displayed properly, but the odds of their email program having the same tab settings as your word processor aren't too good.
Here's a trick for pasting text containing tabs into Mulberry and having it substitute the proper number of spaces for each tab (this may not work on some operating systems or versions of Mulberry). Switch your composition window from "Plain" to "HTML" (using the little popdown menu that appears above the text area of your draft window). Then paste in your text and switch the window back to "Plain" from the popdown menu (you'll be asked if you want to lose formatting - click OK). This should cause Mulberry to substitute spaces where your tab characters were.
Remember that email is text editing rather than full word processing. It's not possible to do very complex formatting or (if you use an email program that does have more complex formatting options) expect those receiving your messages to see it displayed the way you intended it to. For complex documents it's sometimes best to attach a word processing file version of the document, and perhaps include enough of the file's content in the message to let people know whether they really need to save and view the attachment.
Another possible problem when copy and pasting text from a word processor into Mulberry is the use of "fancy" characters. Some word processors will automatically substiute the regular straight single and double quote characters with fancier curly quotes. These will display as question marks or other strange characters to the people who receive your message. If you often cut and past from your word processor to email you should turn off any "smart quote" features. In MS Word this can be turned off in Format:Autoformat. Click the Options button at the bottom of the Autoformat dialog box and then click on the AutoFormat tab. Remove the check in front of ""Straight quotes with smart quotes." You may need to disable this option in the Autoformat As You Type tab, too.
Many other "special" characters such as bullets, degree symbols, m-dashes, etc. will also not display properly went sent as email. Your safe using just the characters you can type using just the regular and shifted number and alphabet keys.
If you have these special characters or smart quotes already in a document you may need to use the search and replace feature to subsitute a regular character for them.
Text within an email message often doesn't copy and paste very satisfactorily into a word processor. There are hard returns at the end of each screen line and quoted text often has extra >> characters before each line. Mulberry has the capability of cleaning up these problems, but it can only do this in the draft window and not within the incoming message window.
So to clean up text before pasting it into a word processor you first need to copy the text and paste it into a new draft window. Once you've done that you can use various command from the Draft menu to make the text easier to work with in a word processor. You'll need to select (highlight) the text you want to clean up before using these menu options. The two most useful options are:
Unquote Lines - This removes the > characters that appear before each quoted line. You may have to use this command more than once for heavily quoted text. Use this command before you use the Unwrap Lines command below.
Unwrap Lines - this will remove the hard return characters at the end of each line but retain them at the end of each paragraph (Mulberry looks for an extra blank line after a paragraph).
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Last Edited on 12/9./02 jrn