When you send email newsletters to a wide variety of people, you cannot be sure exactly how your design is going to look in their email software. There are many pitfalls to do with screen size, inbox orientation, layout, colours, backgrounds, fonts and symbols because what works in your email package during testing might not work in a different email package or on a different computer exactly the same. This article focuses on entity codes, the solution to avoiding strange characters like upside down question marks or even more bizarre characters like these ones:

When HTML was first designed in the 1990s, it was limited to those characters in the range of seven-bit ASCII, a telegraphic language used since 1960. This means that in order to get certain non-ASCII characters to work on different computers and different browsers, we must use entity codes in the HTML instead of simply typing or copying and pasting the symbols. Some WYSIWIG applications like Adobe Dreamweaver, will automatically convert typed or pasted symbols into the correct HTML symbol codes, if you set them up to do so, but you should always be aware of this issue and check the HTML code yourself.

If you are using a web-based email marketing package, you will probably need to ensure your symbols are entered in the HTML code using entity codes. Entity codes (also known as character entity references) take the format &label; where "label" is a case-sensitive alphanumeric string. For example, the character "ä" can be encoded as &auml; in an HTML 4 document. Characters <, >, " and & are used to delimit tags, attribute values, and character references. Character entity references &lt;, &gt;, &quot; and &amp;, which are predefined in HTML, XML, and SGML, can be used instead for literal representations of the characters.

The most useful entity codes for email blasts

Dashes

Quotes

You might be wondering when to use curly and when to use straight quote marks. Rest assured this is a dilemma faced not only by email marketers and web designers, but by graphic designers and typesetters (text focused layout) as well. Generally speaking, curly quotes look more attractive and professional than straight quotes and enhance the readability of the text. This is because of how clear it is what letters they apply to. Which of the following two blocks is easier to read?

"I would really like to buy this 'Copywriting for email newsletters e-book'," said Sammy, who was reading a copy of the 'Dialog Times'. "They say it's "easy as 1-2-3!"."

OR

“I would really like to buy this ‘Copywriting for email newsletters e-book’,” said Sammy, who was reading a copy of the ‘Dialog Times’. “They say it’s “easy as 1-2-3!”.”

If you still prefer the arguably “cleaner” look of straight quotes, choose what is best for you and be consistent.

Other Punctuation

Letters with accents (foreign symbols)

* In the above you can replace the “A” in the entity code with another character (eg. upper or lower case) in order to get the accent on your desired character.

1. Netscape 4.7 does not support the code &Yuml; but the numeric version (&#159;) works.

Foreign characters (foreign entity codes)

Currency Symbols

XML Character References

There are only five XML character entity references because these are the characters that are used in XML (and HTML) to open and close tags, define names etc.

Click here to download a two-page entity code wall chart

Please email
Amanda@GreensladeCreations.com
or call 0403 124 533
to discuss your needs.

For details of all of Amanda's services, including how she can train your staff to maintain your website, email newsletter, image collection and more, please download this Greenslade Creations brochure.

Pricing information is available here.

Email | Layout | Writing | SEO | DAM