Still have unwanted characters and spaces in email

I have two forms that are giving me unwanted spaces between paragraphs and also inserting characters into the message. I worked with Ray on this over the phone on Tues (8/6) along with some other issues. The other issues seem to be fixed but the formatting issue remains. The original message was given to me in Word so before sending it out I copied/pasted it into Notepad to strip out all extraneous formatting. I then copy/pasted it into the email form from Notepad. I've attached both the original message and the email version so you can compare how different they look. Before I sent the email, the message looked fine in the online form.

You can see the paragraphs seem to be double or triple spaced and there are characters inserted so you see things like "p! lan" and "Ho! pe" that are not in the original. Ray turned of Magic Quotes on the server so I know that's not it.

Can you offer any suggestions from this info or do I need to do another Premiere call?

Thanks.

You might try adding some css to the header of the email:

<style>
p {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
</style>

Are you copying and pasting the content from word? If so, you might try first pasting into notepad to remove all of the junk styles word will add and then re-copy and paste from notepad.

I did copy into Notepad first, then copied that into the form.

Do I add that code into the page that contains the form, or into the email template page? That might help with the spacing issue, but what about the inserted characters?

Thanks, Ray.

You would add it to the email template.

Are you sure they don't show up in Notepad? Usually that is caused again by strange characters added by Word. Since you are sending it to me in pdf format it is kind of comparing apples to oranges and makes it hard to find what the issue is in the format it occurs in.

Maybe if you send the email and then save a copy of the exact text you pasted when you sent the email as well as a copy of the email that was sent, then I could scrutinize what the exact issue is. Looking at word documents to try to find formatting issues that are occurring in other formats is difficult if not impossible.

I have Spartan running and have taken what I copied from Notepad to paste in the form and saved it as a txt file which I've attached so you can see it. As you can see there are no paragraphs in the Notepad version as well as some centering differences from the email. That's because once I pasted the letter's contents into the form I added the paragraphs back in and adjusted the centering to match the sender's original message as formatted in Word. But the formatting was done in the email form as it had been stripped out in Notepad. So that's why I don't think it was leftover junk from Word.

I tried saving my gmail copy of the message that was sent out to my Google Drive but gmail saves it as a pdf. I can forward it to you if you think that will help (I'll need an email address) or if you know of another way to attach it here.

I did add the style to the email template, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope on that as it's for the <p> formatting only and doesn't really address the extra characters.

So if you want me to send you the email, let me know how to do that. Otherwise I guess I'll just wait and report back the next time I use the form.

Thanks, Ray.

We'll probably have to look into this more in a premier ticket. If we fix it quickly (less than 20 minutes) then I won't charge you for it... but let's schedule a time and debug. I 'm not seeing the problem based on what you've told me so far, so it needs more investigation.

Thanks, Ray. We can use the Word doc and do the copy/paste via Notebook to test it out since we know that caused problems. I wouldn't really care except it looks so dorky! :)

I know we're in different time zones so say noon or 1 pm next week Mon-Thur could work for me. Just let me know and I'll be ready.

I put you in my calendar for Monday at 9am my time... that should be noon your time.

Question...