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mysociety / writetothem

Write to your MP, MEP, & other elected representatives.
https://www.writetothem.com
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Double spacing in letters to MP #351

Closed MyfanwyNixon closed 5 years ago

MyfanwyNixon commented 7 years ago

An MP's office writes:

I think that you have recently changed your format for the emails that come through your portals or, at least, the ones we are getting are now double spaced… this means that they are taking up several pieces of paper including a whole sheet for your final paragraph. This is not helpful when using publicly-funded paper!

No, there is not time to cut and paste/change the format of each email. Yes, I realise that I am a dinosaur in that in this office we print off emails (apart from the standard ones) and still keep paper files. But please, a 4 page email where I then have to throw away the final page is a bit ridiculous.

The email is titled "new format for letters" and dated 30 Sept - it's in the WTT support inbox if you'd like to see the example that she forwarded.

Struan/Zarino suggest we might be "adding linebreaks in a way we didn't before, and they're being turned into paragraphs by whatever email client they're using"

MyfanwyNixon commented 7 years ago

She is using Outlook.

MyfanwyNixon commented 5 years ago

An MP's office writes:

I am writing following receipt of many emails from “writetothem.com” to ask if there is anything you can do about the way your emails are sent to us. Every time we receive an email, we tend to print them out to keep a copy of them however, due to the layout of your emails (usually double spaced and also not filling up the full line of page) the emails tend to spread over several pages – when 1 would normally do if it was spaced correctly. Unfortunately, due to the way the emails are formatted you cannot simply just shrink the paragraph to single spacing and therefore it would require a manual delete of all the extra paragraph spaces. Is there any way you can chance the format that these messages are received? I’m sure we can’t be the only office who print these out and therefore face the same issues?

MyfanwyNixon commented 5 years ago

More details:

We use Microsoft Outlook to receive and send emails. The emails are in double spacing when viewed and when printed and if viewing on screen in maximum screen viewing space, the text also only comes about half way across the page.

The previous correspondent was also using Outlook (who knows; it might be the same one, but our retention policy means there's no way of checking).

dracos commented 5 years ago

Finally tracked this down! Should be fixed by https://github.com/mysociety/writetothem/commit/974a53dc793fa87da9ca404aff32927abf22d25d