I'm very sorry you saw my reply as attacking you. That was not the
intention. And, as Alan and Matt have said, I do not work for Microsoft. I
actually quite enjoy being able to track down bugs in Entourage and
reporting them back to Microsoft. Sometimes they even get fixed.
OK, I thought you wanted people to try to replicate what you were seeing. I
did try, with a 260K text file. I have only spent some 10 minutes looking
for missing characters, so there may well be some I didn't notice. But, so
far, I haven't noticed any. I had to ask about Character Formats, since
including non-ASCII characters in a message flagged as US-ASCII or
ISO-8859-1 could certainly have been a plausible cause of the problem.
Thanks for confirming you use only ASCII characters - that excludes that
possibility.
So I started wondering about how you were creating these email messages by
copying and pasting from another text application. That's where the
capitalization in your message comes in - sorry I didn't make my thinking
more explicit at that point, but I was just wondering. Yes, you had
AutoCorrect on. But, as Alan points out, simply typing a message in
Entourage does not create capitalized characters at the beginning of every
line even with AutoCorrect on: the text soft wraps. It's only hard-wrapped -
carriage returns inserted - when the message is sent. You only get upper
case letters at the beginnings of sentences and paragraphs - paragraphs
being defined by a preceding carriage return. So I'm guessing that you must
have hard-wrapped the text in another application, copied and pasted it in.
Perhaps the same application you use for the long texts? Does it allow
hard-wrapping of every line? For example, BBEdit, TextWrangler, and Tex-Edit
Plus, all have a feature that lets you set the line length to a fixed number
of characters and then hard--wrap al lines before saving. Do you do
something like that?
Entourage has a sophisticated procedure for hard-wrapping plain text email
messages to fit the internet protocols which mandate an 80-character maximum
per line. Like the other text programs, it breaks at the closest word-end to
the limit. But it does not use 80 as the limit: it uses 76 characters.
That's to accommodate email replies which prefix " >" - space and a ">"
character - to lines when quoting original text in replies. By setting 76 as
the maximum rather than 80, Entourage can get up to 3 re-replies and a "you sometimes see in email when one of the correspondents uses an email
client that doesn't do the same. Most do, but not all. Apple's Mail client
does not use " >" in replies, it uses a vertical colored line, so quit
possibly Mail uses the full 80 characters, or more than 76 anyway, as the
maximum, not thinking about the other mail clients out there. Outlook
Windows seems to use closer to 80 as well - I often get those broken reply
lines from Outlook users even in the first reply.
Different text applications may use different definitions of "word endings"
as well - some may include certain punctuation characters as word separators
whereas other allow them as part of a word. That would mean that a line
would be broken in an earlier place, leaving a short remnant on the next
line before the line break already inserted by the previous application.
I can imagine that there might well be some cases where just a single
character, or maybe two, remain on a line that Entourage breaks again
because the hard-wrapped text pasted in includes more than 76 characters.
There are certain characters that aren't allowed - for example a single
period "." signals "end of message" and need to be doubled or removed. The
word "From" at the beginning of a line signals "new message" in MBOX formats
for storing message (mailbox) folders, so Entourage is careful to prefix a
">" in front of those lines - that would add a character requiring another
break at the end if the line is full-length. It's quite possible that
Entourage is doing something incorrectly in certain circumstances that
results in characters getting lost. It might even be that the large messages
merely increase the likelihood rather than create the conditions.
Anyway, if it's easy for you NOT to hard-wrap the text in your text program
before copying and pasting, and allow Entourage to do that for you, it would
be worth trying that to experiment and see if that solves the problem, if
you're interested in using Entourage. If other requirements you have mean
that's not an option, and you can't change the line-length, then you won't
be able o try that. It certainly would be a lot easier to control absolutely
what the reader will see if you could send files, preferably compressed, as
attachments. (One more possibility would be to send the file _uncompressed_
as an attachment. Most email clients display text attachments inline as part
of the message, but the attachment could always be saved and opened in the
case of problems with the inline display. But if you think you have some
recipients who cannot receive attachments at all, that's not an option.)
If Apple's Mail does not display any of these problems then it certainly
seems a better match for you. It would still be interesting to try to
discover if the missing characters in Entourage are due to bugs in Entourage
- and what these bugs might consist of - or in the hard-wrap settings you
use in your text application, or in something else entirely I haven' thought
of. But so far, I do not see missing characters in text that originated as
soft-wrapped message text pasted in. I also sometimes send long messages
with up to 4000 short lines pasted in, where each line is a hard-wrapped
"activation code" for my shareware scripts only about 15-20 characters in
length, for distribution with the scripts. It would be a disaster if any
characters were omitted - the codes wouldn't work. But that never happens.
In this case the lines don't have to be altered, ever, since they're so
short. So I think there's a good chance that the problems arise from
hard-wrapped pasted text whose criteria for line-length differ from
Entourage's, making Entourage re-adjust some of the lines and thus leaving
some very short remnants. If you or anyone else would like to look into this
further, we could perhaps narrow it down. But it does require a scientific
approach, as Matt says, and the willingness to look into every possibility
and try replicating conditions (and also specifying what the conditions are)
without feeling attacked.
--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <
http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>
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