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How to fix issues with plain text

  1. Exclaimer Knowledge Base
  2. Signature Design
  3. Troubleshooting
Payal Arya
  • Updated

Scenario

When you view, reply/forward an email that has been sent using plain text format, you notice that the signature displays misaligned and without formatting. 

Example:

Reason

Exclaimer is based on HTML in the source code. When an email is converted to plain text, the HTML formatting is removed along with images, and horizontally aligned elements appear underneath each other.

Outlook displays a warning message prompting what will be lost when using plain text mode, as they are unsupported.
Example:

Due to security reasons, Outlook also displays the full hyperlink when plain text is used, so you know where the URL is pointing to.

In the above example screenshot, we know that commas, separators and the address fields would display underneath each other when compared to how they were configured to be side-by-side in the signature template.

Resolution

NOTE: The steps described here assume that you have already created an email signature. For more information, see how you can create an email signature.

To resolve this issue, you can either follow method 1 or method 2 - please click on the required options listed below to go through the detailed description:

Method 1: Combine the fields into one text box 
To minimize the issue, we recommend combining the fields into one text box where applicable.

This method will allow the fields to hide, as usual, however, the prefixes and separators will remain visible. We cannot control the visibility of the separators and prefixes this way.

If a field is not required for everyone, we recommend to re-position the field or create two versions of the field by using conditional visibility as described in Method 2.
Example:

When combining fields, we also recommend including separators whether they are a pipe, comma, forward slash and so on - this helps to minimize the issue and allows the fields to align correctly.
Example:

The plain text will now align the text correctly as per the HTML template.

Example:

Method 2: Use Conditional Visibility
Follow the same steps as before, however, to ensure that the Company Name and Mobile will hide if they are not available - use conditional visibility to control the fields further.

To achieve this:

  1. Add the Job Title and Telephone number fields into the template while ensuring the rest of the template stays in place.

  2. Apply the formatting required, to match the signature theme.
    Example:
  1. Set Visibility on the text boxes of the field you wish to display - in this instance if Company Name is Visible and if Mobile is Visible.

    Start with the Job Title, click on this field and navigate to the Visibility option. Set the visibility to check if the Company Name is empty then this field will show as a single value.
  1. Next, click on the Job Title and Company Name text box and set the visibility to show if the Company Name is not empty (that is, populated).

    This will prevent duplicate data from appearing in the signature template.

    Repeat these steps, and apply them to the Telephone field, ensuring that the Company Name is replaced with Mobile for the visibility setting.