Issue
Customers pasting foreign language data from formatted resources like Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, HTML, and emails into Email Templates may find that some of the data has changed after pasting it into Email Templates. These subtle changes may go unnoticed but can be as severe as having some content be malformed or missing when pasting into Email Templates.
Reason
In the below example, we'll be using Microsoft Word as the example, but the following can apply to any formatted text source.
Although Microsoft Word documents appear to contain text and formatting, they are often much more complicated than expected. The data from Microsoft Word often contains lots of additional information, which is difficult for non-Microsoft applications to interpret.
Some things that we have noticed include:
- Formatted ordered and unordered lists may be pasted and lose formatting and content. This can be especially difficult when numbers are truncated or appear to be changed.
- Font and formatting may not fully replicate the Microsoft Word formatting with the builder when pasting a formatted document.
Solution
Although ContactMonkey continues to make changes to compensate for formatting errors, customers are recommended to follow the below best practices when transferring data into an Email Template.
Customers should be looking to copy only paste plain, unformatted text into the ContactMonkey editor. Then, format it within the editor afterward.
- This would involve pasting your text into an intermediary tool like Windows Notepad or Mac Text Edit (in plain text mode). Mac users can also paste data using Shift + Command (⌘) + V to paste without formatting.
- The text can be highlighted and copied before it is pasted into the ContactMonkey editor.
- Formatting can be applied within the ContactMonkey template editor, and any links or other formatting requirements can be added back.