College To Save Money By Switching Email Font 306
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has come up with an unusual way of saving money: changing their email font. The school expects to use 30% less ink by switching from Arial to Century Gothic. From the article: "Diane Blohowiak is the school's director of computing. She says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one. That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon. Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school's five-year plan to go green. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio it's great that a change that's eco-friendly also saves money."
email? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if people are printing emails...
Re:email? (Score:5, Funny)
Next up - saving electricity by using smaller fonts on the computer screens.
I have a bad feeling about this....
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
...of course that wouldn't work given that smaller fonts would mean fewer dark foreground pixels and more bright background pixels. Switching from white backgrounds to gray backgrounds would be more likely to have any impact (assuming that modern monitors use more electricity when displaying bright images).
What no one seems to have brought up is that while Century Gothic uses less ink than Arial, it also takes up more space (unless
Re:email? (Score:5, Funny)
In summary let me just say this one thing:
WHOOSH !
Inverse of "whoosh"? (Score:2)
In summary let me just say this one thing: WHOOSH !
Are you serious about the joking? I can see no real evidence in the quoted report that it's meant to be less than serious. Also, the fact that this is being done for the sake of greenitude pretty definitively points in a contrary direction. People who are really into the green thing usually lack a sense of humor, and are incapable of making jokes—especially about their ideology. They are also quite likely to believe that measures like this work.
So what's the inverse of a whoosh? suuuuck?
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Sigh. I think I'll just shut up now and maybe go for a walk - the coffee obviously isn't helping much.
Re:Inverse of "whoosh"? (Score:4, Funny)
(or to use a more common vernacular, we're 'loosers').
And since most people can't tell the difference between loose and lose, most of them just wind up calling you a loser......ah, the stupidity of the masses.....
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http://3430.online.fr/computing/electricity_power_consumption.html [online.fr]
According to that, the negligible power difference is actually in favor of showing white images on LCDs in most cases. It makes sense that unless the screen dims when showing dark colors (as you see on some TVs), there is extra effort required to change the color from its natural state, light, to dark.
With CRTs, the opposite would be true. Black should require less power than white.
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Actually, it will work because it takes more power to display black than white on a computer monitor.
You're probably thinking of CRTs, where the opposite is true, but these days, everyone uses LCDs, and with an LCD, it takes more power to block out the backlight with a pixel.
Of course, the power difference with different fonts is completely negligible.
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it takes more power to block out the backlight with a pixel.
That depends on what type of LCD panel it is. TN (twisted nematic) panels (most common type in cheaper displays) are clear in their off state and darken when voltage is applied, but VA (vertical alignment) panels are the exact opposite.
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LCD's use ever-so-slightly more power for dark than they do for bright. The backlight is always-on, and the LCD goes active to block out that light for dark spots, passive for bright spots. White backgr
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Ok, sure, we can save the trees, but then we're back to the first problem of using too much ink. Ink doesn't grow on trees you know. Won't somebody think of the squids? ANYBODY?
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Re:email? (Score:4, Funny)
I worked in a DoD office a few years ago that was run by a Colonel who had all of his emails printed out in triplicate (one for his office, one for home, and one to file) by his secretary. He never read any of his email on his computer.
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It's not funny people! My boss used to do the same! Only thing is he told me it's a paper trail used to cover his ass in case something goes wrong. And usually things did go wrong. Running Windows was sometimes the cause ...
Re:email? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:email? (Score:5, Funny)
Since it is a smaller, lighter font, you can save a lot of money by not needing such large hard disks to store them.
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Have you worked at a school? I do, and I run all the labs at a community college. These people are the villains of the forest. I'm not sure how much we spent per year on paper, but the local school district here (have a good friend who is a sys admin there) says they spend over 80k on paper every year - that's like 2 employees at the wages they pay people.
I do know they bring paper here on huge pallets in massive semi trucks driven here by Georgia Pacific - that's usually a sigh that you have a problem.
Need
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Were you a student for a while?
Then you'd know that all good intentions start with printing out everything. "I am a good student, I'm going to print it out and start reading it as soon as err tomorrow"
Heres an idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Heres an idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Heres an idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not laser print? (Score:5, Informative)
Who was the genius there that had them using ink jet printers instead of laser? Probably the same genius that thinks this will save them money?
Re:Why not laser print? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. If you're printing emails on the school's inkjet printers, your font is probably not the only change you need to make.
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It references saving ink and the cost of ink.
That means that they are using printers that use ink rather than toner.
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Laser printers use toner, not ink. It's quite possible the article writer does not know the difference, but there is one.
Dye sublimation printers also use something commonly referred to as ink, but ink jet printers are much more common.
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Possibly the part where they mention ink and how much it costs?
Fun fact : it would be cheaper to print in blood than in HP ink [consumerist.com]?
Unless their "director of computing" can't tell the difference between ink and toner, which wouldn't surprise me overmuch.
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when i did a year of consulting for a US Army agency years ago, it seemed like almost everyone wanted their own personal printer. most people thought they were too good to share a printer with the 50 other people on the floor. so they probably bought inkjets for all the cry babies who wanted their own printer
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It's even worse where I work. Most of the departments *have* workgroup-class laser printers (or huge copy machines with network print capability). Many of the staff just can't be bothered to get off their lazy asses to walk down a hall to their workroom to get their printouts. Yes, it's that simple... :(
Re:Why not laser print? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's where you talk to the corporate health and wellness people. Remind them of the recommendations that everyone get up and walk around periodically during the day, and the omnipresence of personal inkjets means people aren't walking.
Suddenly, all those printers will get yanked by the health fascists. Use evil for good. ;)
Re:Why not laser print? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is probably very close to the truth. The people in question are probably professors, and the way internal politics works in most Universities (I have worked for 3) the professors have most of the power. Since they all want a personal printer, they all get one, but they are the ones in charge of the budget and there is no way they are going to buy a laser printer when they could buy a cheaper inkjet (since "it is almost free"). Since the ink often comes out of a budget that is not theirs (at least not directly), they don't care about on-going costs (nor were they really going to think about them in the first place).
And the professors in question are often older (this affects both eyesight, and comfort with technology), and they are often getting email that needs to be marked up (notes on scientific papers, reviews of their post-doc's work, etc...), and you find that they get in the habit of printing out everything. There are some who are moving to a mostly-digital workflow, but the tools for this are still specialized or not well known in the community (they are just learning about how to use editing notes in Word).
In most Universities the local IT has no power to change any of these, and has to walk a lot of very fine lines politically (while being underpaid for even the normal job). Central IT often can put out edicts, since people there have the ear of the dean, but localized IT has both the responsibility to enforce these edicts, and none of the power to do so.
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This is perhaps where something like an iPad could help go towards paperless... but like in Avatar, where they uplink to the bodies for the first time, the scientist slides what he is interested in off his main computer onto a slate, there needs to be tech that facilitates the exchange of "papers" the same way between devices. Without thinking about it, mucking with file formats or email adresses.
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In fact, screw emails entirely. Want that. Want that. Want!
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This is perhaps where something like an iPad could help go towards paperless.
When you consider the reasons people print their email, a trinket like the iPad is going completely the wrong direction. The people I've known that print their email usually do so for a few reasons:
- Easier for them to read on paper than a monitor
- They can easily annotate with corrective marks, shapes, arrows, comments
- Collate and file the message away with other paperwork
- Just don't like using computers for whatever reason and
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Re:Why not laser print? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not as simple as you'd think (though there is no good reason it shouldn't be simple!).
See -- I work in the ITS department in a college. We strongly discourage the individual departments from purchasing inkjet printers, however, because they're "cheap", and since we're facing huge budget reductions, the departments purchase them anyway. They're then upset at the ink costs, which we warned them about. They're even more pissed when they find out we can't obtain parts to fix their cheap pieces of garbage (let alone that, even if parts were available, our time spent fixing such a POS would make it too expensive). It all boils down to short-term thinking. They *never* take into account how long they'd like the printer to work, and it's total cost of operation. They only see the initial bottom-line.
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The thing is, you can now get decent laser printers VERY cheap. (Like my Brother HL-2070N)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Until they hit the $30 mark (or less), it won't matter to these people.
Like I said -- they only see the up-front cost. Trying to make them see that such a printer will cost them *far* more in the long run is like trying to convince Glenn Beck that he's wrong -- about *anything*.
It's the same genius... (Score:2)
It's the same genius that tells employees to save all their electronic documents using smaller fonts to save disk space...
Printing email. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you could stop printing out all of your emails.
Oh, who am I kidding. We've still got professors at my school lecturing with transparencies they produced on typewriters. It's going to be years before the entirety of the faculty is willing to handle paperless communication.
--saint
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A recent example came up at work recently. We had a design meeting between many people/departments at my work. I had pertinent notes in an email that needed to be at the meeting. The option was to setup a A/V system to display the email then forward copies to everyone, or I could print ten copies and hand them out.
The second option took me less than 10 seconds (including waiting for them to print and walking over to pick them up). During t
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My wife worked in the lab of an eminent scientist in college. When he was away at conferences, one of her jobs was to print out all of his e-mails (including personal ones), put them in a Fedex box, and ship them to him.
She wasn't the only lab assistant who had to do that, either.
Ah (Score:2)
Its a university.. where you *TURN IN* papers. Yes, you can email them, but professors think they are gods of there classrooms and can demand paper copies.
from a professor (Score:5, Funny)
professors think they are gods of there classrooms and can demand paper copies.
We also think we can demand proper spelling. Now bow before me!
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ah, the real idiots of slashdot who try to attack commenters without even reading the fucking title, much less the summary or article.
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Yes, so what?
How does changing the email font have any effect on the amount of ink (or the font) used for creating papers?
In summary, I agree with your first point, which is proven by your second.
Re:Ah (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to accept digital copies. I stopped, for a lot of reasons: unverifiable "I sent it, really, my email must not be working" excuses, file format incompatibilities, people emailing papers during the class sessions that they skipped so that they could finish them, etc.
The physical paper affords a lot of interactions as well - it's easy to gesture over a region of writing, circle it quickly, etc. Most digital versions of those gestures don't work (I could imagine - maybe - some of them working on a pad or tablet, but that's a stretch.) HCI research, trying to identify why an automation effort failed, observed the importance of physical writing in the care of hospital patients noted how much information was stored in the materials. Nurses could identify authors immediately from handwriting; density of writing often cued the dynamics of care; annotations connected writing to clarify the treatment plan, etc.
The biggest reason, however, is that I don't want to have to sit in an office to read and grade dozens of papers. I want to be able to do it on a plane, a train, a bus, on the beach, etc.
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Also, all your points on hospitals are void. You give an opinion but studies show otherwise. http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2009/01_26_09.html [hopkinsmedicine.org]
Last one I agree with but I think you'd be greatly helped out by a good e-ink type tablet with stylus. The tech is there or getting there depending on how fussy you are.
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(Wait a bit) and try an eBook that supports annotations using a touch screen & stylus - e.g. an iRex one. You can bring *every* paper anyone has made with you instead, and be able to read comfortably as well. What I cannot understand is how you can accept only paper copies. Are there contributions so uninteresting that you don't want to store or index them somewhere?
Printer Ink? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder how much money they waste on email storage and bandwidth costs by sending HTML mail instead of plain text too.
Haha haha ha haaa... wait, were you serious? .docs (even more than they do already >:(). How much space do you think that will waste. Go back to using gopher if you don't like the web, same idea.
You know if people can't apply some simple formatting in the email reliably, they're just going to attach Word
disclaimer: in the industry (Score:3, Informative)
Firstly, train your students that printing up emails is stupid.
Secondly of all, give the students access to community laser printers. We're talking about pennies per page versus small fractions of pennies per page to print (i.e. 10 cents versus 0.001 cents)
Thirdly, switch over to re manufactured inks and toners. If the students are aware that they can buy aftermarket inks and toners, there's another 50% savings off the top (AND it's "green"). There are good companies and there are bad companies. Find someone local. Its supports the nearby economy. If you have problems, you don't have to ship something back to China.
[disclaimer: I work in the reman industry. I'm biased. Lasers tend to be more reliable than reman'd inks. With lasers, you can disassemble everything and replace the parts. With inkjets, it's more like an artform. If the electronics fail (which they often do), the cart is SOL]
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Student printing largely pays for itself through the printing fees charged to the students. I am sure the UWGB is advocating to their students to make the font change, but that is largely a secondary issue. What they are probably talking about here is printing done by faculty and staff, where the local IT department picks up the cost of ink/toner.
And I think your measurement of the cost for lasers is a couple of orders of magnitude off. It is still much cheaper than ink-jet, but not that much cheaper.
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Secondly of all, give the students access to community laser printers.
In the early to mid 2000s, the community laser printers were black and white.
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It's on topic, so I'll continue for a bit.
There are two ways to remanufacture the average laser.
1. The cheapest way: Drill and Fill. A company takes an empty laser cartridge and either splits it in half with a saw or drills a hole in it. They pour in toner, seal up the hole, and sell the cartridge. This produces a low cost, crappy cartridge. These will fail mid-stream, produce crap output, and possibly will leak.
2. The proper way: Disassemble, clean, re manufacture, reassemble, test. Most cartridges can be
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I was looking for a toner cartridge recently (MLT-D108S specifically) and found out that the re-manufacturing service in my city were simply too expensive compared new cartridge. The cheapest quote I got was $60, which is significantly more than the $45 price of a brand new cartridge on eBay. Not to mentioned I would have spend the time to take two trips to the store versus waiting for the cartridge to arrive at my doorsteps.
Not a bad idea... (Score:5, Informative)
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...if only for the fact that Century Gothic looks better [imgur.com] than Arial.
Uh...the link displays a 1x1-pixel png, and what's more, I think it's white. So they certainly would save ink using a font like this.
(Did something just go "whoosh" over my head?)
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.sig files... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes I get emails where the sig is longer than the body of the freakin' email.
Use semicolons instead of colons (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/?F=1&CharIDs=&ViewType=Full&NoDateRange=1&SingleDate=08%2F20%2F1996&Order=s.DateStrip&PerPage=5&After=04%2F16%2F1989&Before=03%2F26%2F2010&CharFilter=Any [dilbert.com]
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I've got a better idea - move all email to Twitter: You only get 140 characters. Period. The only other thing better would be to route all e
Error: Slashdot has moved all posts to twitter. Try shortening your post.
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Re:.sig files... (Score:5, Funny)
=========
Beaker Meep Esq
Vice President of Product Testing and Evanglising Evanagalist
Honey Doo Industries L.L.C
1 Muppet Lane
Hensonville, USA 31337
Beaker@HoneyDooIndustriesLLC.com
http://www.honeydooindustriesllc.com/ [honeydooin...iesllc.com]
Twitter: @MeepMeepMeep
Facebook: IHateHoneyDooMeep
Tumblr: MeepMeepMeepMeeepMeep.meep
MySpace:MeepItLikeYoMotherMadeYa
Friendster: Meep
Orkut: MeepMeep
All text available from this post is copyright protected © 2000-2010 by Beaker the Muppet Meep. Unless stated otherwise, all text is provided free of charge. All text is provided on an "as is" basis without warranty of any kind, express or implied. Under no circumstances and under no legal theory, whether in tort, contract, or otherwise, shall Beaker the Muppet Meep, or Bunsen Honeydoo be liable to you or to any other person for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages of any character including, without limitation, damages for loss of goodwill, work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or for any and all other damages or losses. If you do not agree with these terms, then you are advised not to read.
Please consider the environment before reading all this drivel.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Another approach would be to ban .sig files, complete with
ridiculous gigantic
name, email address, snail-mail, address,
three phone numbers, URL, twitter link,
facebook link, linkedin link, blog link,
some kind of logo and a giant block of text
mandated by legal. Oh yeah, and coded in
HTML so it matches corporate colours. Ugh.
Sometimes I get emails where the sig is longer than the body of the freakin' email.
Yes. ;-)
You're right.
It's also annoying when people quote without trimming.
- c64_love
Fred Haddad - via ...!eds1!devon
.. . __ /// NOW PLAYING: /// CD quality music
.\X/ "Only Amiga makes it possible!"
FidoNet node 1:270/411
UUCP:
!rhutch!Fred.Haddad
Fred.Haddad
@rhutch.FIDONET.ORG
. .
__
\\/// Over 1 million colors
(Yes these are my actual sigs from the 1980s, when I was young and stupid and made them ridiculously long
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Yeah, I really hate that, too.
--
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3a
Charset: noconv
iQCVAwUBMXVGMFIa2NdXHZJZAQFe4AQAz0FZrHdH8o+zkIvcI/4ABg4gfE7cG0xE
Z2J9GVWD2zi4tG+s1+IWEY6Ae17kx925JKrzF4Ti2upAwTN2Pnb/x0G8WJQVKQzP
mZcD+XNnAaYCqFz8iIuAFVLchYeWj1Pqxxq0weGCtjQIrpzrmGxV7xXzK0jus+6V
rML3TxQSwdA=
=T9Mc
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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Oh yeah, and coded in HTML so it matches corporate colours.
Does it take more ink to print text that's been formatted in HTML?
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Of course. Examples from personal experience:
1) Pictures (come on! who needs pictures in a sig?) ... and bold text
2) Font style and size
3) Color
Color doesn't directly mean more ink, but it still costs more money to print (color being more expensive than B&W).
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P please consider the environment before printing this post.
Why not use Ecofont? (Score:5, Informative)
It has "holes" in the letters to save ink. So instead of 30% less ink usage this college would have about 45% less ink usage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofont [wikipedia.org]
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Better than that (Score:3, Insightful)
4 ) In order to optimise the legibility of the printed text, we have set an Ecoprint range. Only text up to a particular point size – generally 11 points - is printed in the Ecofont font. Larger text is printed in the normal font.
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Why not use it?
First, it's ugly. I mean really, helvetic'ish ugly. Second, the holes haven't been designed well - there's a high variability in color tone between the characters that gives an astigmatic dazzle effect and that make the text very fatiguing to read. Third, it doesn't scale well - magnifying by 20% increases the visibility of these flaws.
Similar ideas (Score:2)
While I agree that printing emails is stupid, the idea of changing defaults to reduce ink and toner usage is rather smart. At my company, they changed the default Powerpoint template to one that would save on printing costs. Again, people shouldn't be printing them out in the first place, but the fact is that they do, and this will save money.
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Well, idle is pants (Score:2)
Google for Arial and Century Gothic. The former is clearl ment for reading, the latter for presentation. Arial is easy to read because it has enough "squiggles" for the brain to distinguish letters at rapid pace. Century gothic looks very nice and I would recommend it any day for BIG Headlines Buy This Car Now - type things, never for something you are supposed to be actually reading for prolonged time.
Then again, who the hell send an email over 50 words these days? So, *shrug*
Save even more (Score:2)
Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
We've seen this before (Score:2)
There was a /. a couple of years ago about a company that release "ink saving" fonts that had holes in them - micro-dots in the black area of each letter, designed to be invisible to the naked eye, yet indistinguishable from the regular fonts.
Save even more money... (Score:2)
They could save even more by changing the font colour to white.
But then some bright spark will suggest they need to order black paper so the white ink will show up, and they'll be out of pocket again.
or they could (Score:2)
Who knew? (Score:2)
People actually print out their emails?
What the hell is an email font? (Score:2)
/reads and writes email in plain text, goddamn it!
printer ink? (Score:2)
What school office uses printer ink? It's all laser pretty much everywhere. Laser toner is still pretty expensive, though.
Re:Another idea (Score:5, Insightful)
You could also just tell people to stop printing out their emails.
Excellent!!! Can you also tell them to stop shouting, killing, being stupid, go to war?
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I tell users they're stupid all the time. Then they start shouting at me and I kill them.
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Re:#3 (Score:2)
Can I send drawings, images, graphed data or a complex formula (in an easily readable as hand-written format) as part of a text email. I don't think so. I use HTML email specifically because it allows all of the above to be embedded. Otherwise half the email I send would have to contain one or more attachments. So which do you prefer someone send: An attached Excel spreadsheet containing macros or an embedded graph of the data?
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almost make me not so pissed off that that gas was only $3.19 a gallon by my house today.
Except most people use gasoline in gallons and printer ink in milliliters. I've definitely not used anywhere near a gallon of ink in my life so far (and would be shocked if I use a gallon of ink during my entire life), whereas I know I've spent over $10,000 in gas.