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Re: [Evolution] How do you want printed emails to look like?

On Thursday 27 of October 2011 12:01:44 Kåre Fiedler Christiansen wrote:

On Wed, 2011-10-26 at 19:14 +0200, Dan Vratil wrote:

<snip>


But I'd like to hear from all of you what do you think about the
proposed
look, what would you change or keep, or remove... I have printed the
email in various mail clients so that you can compare it and find some
inspiration :)

Evolution - new look: http://pub.progdan.cz/evo/evo-webkit.pdf


Is this the same email as the others? I ask because of the
"attachment.html" attachment that does not seem present in the others.
Also, there is no attachment named "lipsum.txt", though the text is
there.


Yop, it's the same, it's just that Evo handles some things differently, thus 
attachment.html is a HTML version of the plain/text body (can be disabled in 
settings, other MUAs seems to ignore it by default). lipsum.txt is missing 
because the attachment code is still buggy :)


The body of the text: Will you honour the font choice used for
displaying mail, when the mail is not preformatted? I'm thinking mostly
of whether it monospaced or variable width?


I think that the best would be printing text/plain email in monospace and 
richtext and HTML emails in whatever font they have defined (or a default 
one).



I like the fact that quoted text is slightly greyed; signatures after
"-- " should be as well.


+1 



I miss header for the lipsum.txt-attachment. Is this simply because it
is a mockup and forgotten, or do you expect the textual attachments to
have no headers? I would much prefer they do.

I notice the size says "0 bytes", but I assume that's unrelated to the
layout?


Bugs :)



It's annoying to me the way the attachment names break in the icon list
of attachments, and I doubt the value of the icons - if they were
miniatures it might make sense, but as it stands it looks like a waste
of space in the printout. I would prefer as much of the actual content
of the email to be on the first page (while still having a decent
layout, and not advocating eliminating all whitespace or something), and
the list of attachments seems to obstruct that. Perhaps simply a marker
that there are attachments at the top (icon or "3 attachments"), and the
actual attachments at the bottom with or wotihout the list of
attachments first?


I agree that it consumes a lot of space (but I like it! :)) Maybe just adding 
a header item "Attachments: 3"?


Also, information about the attachments are spread out all over the
place, file names at top, titles with the attachments.


I agree, I didn't thought about this. The titles at the attachments should 
contain filenames in brackets. When no title is available, the file name would 
be used instead of it.



I notice you simply ignore the digital signature. Suggestion: Why not
add it as an emblem in the headers?


The digital signature in old Evo is a GtkWidget. We can't have GtkWidgets in 
webview anymore so I'm opened to ideas here. 

I'd agree with putting it to headers, just maybe having a text information 
like "GPG Signed (unverified)" or "S/MIME Encrypted" instead of an emblem 
would be more informative :)



There are no headers or footers. Page numbers are important, I think,
but it would be even better with the subject in the footer as well, so a
lost page of an email could be identified easily.


Sure, will be there.




Evolution - current look: http://pub.progdan.cz/evo/evo-master.pdf


Good: Attachments presented at bottom with available info, page numbers,
digital signature is shown.
Bad: Very poor use of margins, much too little whitespace around
attahcments/sections. Very wide line spacing.

I'm torn whether it's good or bad that plain text attachments are
monospaced. If it's code or tabular, I would much prefer it, if it's
English (or borken latin...) text it makes sense to use variable width.
Could be decided by mime-type?


.txt files have always plain/text mime-type regardless their content.




KMail 2 (KDE 4.7.2): http://pub.progdan.cz/evo/kmail.pdf


I just *love* a printout with the text "Please wait while the signature
is being verified..."


Yop, they should work on this - I left the paper on my table all night and 
it's still verifying.



Good: Very condensed, prominent subject.
Bad: Attachment info different: images below, text above; I don't like
the grey background for the box.


And the hyperlinks are very useful, too :)



Again, I'm torn about the monospaced quality, but that's an issue I have
with email generally :-) Certainly, the printout looks blocky and is
much prettier with variable width fonts, but monospaced text sometimes
contains formatting that is lost when going variable width.


Thunderbird 7.0.1:
http://pub.progdan.cz/evo/thunderbird.pdfhttp://pub.progdan.cz/evo/thun
derbird.pdf

Good: I like the attachment presentation, except the title is missing.
Images are centered, much prettier! I like the list of attachments at
the very end, easy to look at the very end of the email to scan for a
certain attachment.
Bad: Headers and footers much too close to edge of paper, date in footer
seems to be date of printing, not date of email?


Date of email is in the "Date" header. 




GMail: http://pub.progdan.cz/evo/gmail.pdf


Good: Very good header (except GMail logo is waste of space), nice large
readable subject with other info condensed but available.
Bad: Completely impossible to see that the text is from an attachment,
attachment presentation is just horrible, everything jumps around.


Opera issue, in Chrome it looks _slightly_ different but still ugly.




MS Outlook 2007: http://pub.progdan.cz/evo/outlook.pdf


Good: No
Bed: Yes

:-)

How can they simply *ignore* attachments? Oh - they are not completely
ignored, at least they are almost invisibly mentioned in headers...


Office 2007 can't even print to PDF, I had to install a 3rd party software :) 
Maybe when printed on paper the attachments would be there. Hard to say, I 
didn't manage to have the virtual machine see the printer.




I like the idea of the big header in MS Outlook, just instead of
recipient's name I'd rather put there subject of the email, because
when you have a pile of printed emails on the table, you most probably
want to search by their subject. Seeing your name in big letters on
every email makes no sense to me.

Agree, I like GMails look that way.


Attachments. I actually don't like the way any of the clients handle
attachments (maybe Thunderbird...). Listing of attachments is ugly and
the title of every attachment is quite ugly as well. I'm proposing the
top panel with attachment icons and names (which is actually very
similar to the attachment bar you can see in Evolution in the email
preview pane) and then having a big distinguishible header above each
attachment with more detailed informations, or maybe just a horizontal
line with small attachment title and additional informations.


I think I covered it in my ramblings above, but basically I don't like
the icon top bar, it takes too much space and the icons seem not to add
any value. Also, info is spread out all over the place.


So guys, what do you think? What would you like to see in Evo-printing
:) ?

Well, that's my opinions. Hope you can use it.

Best,
  Kåre



Thanks for your opinions.

- Dan



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