Pasting from FF to MS Word - 'Arial' gets ignored by Word.

Factual Questions
1

Hi GQ.

If I copy and paste the contents of a web page I’ve created from Firefox into MS Word, it retains all formatting except the font if the font is ‘Arial’

If I paste from IE it retains it.

Any idea what’s going on? Below is the CSS for the page…

*<STYLE TYPE=“text/css”>

TD
{
font-family:Arial;
font-weight:700;
style:italic;
point-size:12;
color:red;
}

</STYLE>
*

2

Interesting. I can only assume that it has something to do with Firefox treating Ariel as “default,” but it’s still very odd.

I assume when you paste into Word it comes out as Times New Roman or Calibri, correct?

3

I figured it out (I think)

When pasting from FF it is literally pasting the HTML, so only inline css gets pasted. In other words the CSS contained in the page’s head section gets ignored entirely.

When pasting from IE it obviously doesn’t.

4

I’ve ‘solved’ it, by pasting the entire CSS into the <table> tag.

So I am glad that doing this overrides all the TD tags default styling, thus meanign it only has to be inline once (in the one table tag)
Last time I checked, html formatted emails don’t work with style sheets when they are not inline (but in the same page)

5

They do but you have to put the <style></style> tag inside the body tag, because lots of email clients and web-based email programs strip out the entire <head></head> tag for various reasons. Outlook is getting stricter about CSS altogether, tho. It strips out all background images with some settings.

6

Does putting the style tag within the body tag break any web standards rules?

7

Of course it does - style tags go inside the head. But HTML email is like the wild west of Web rules. The clients can and do do whatever they want, so you have to mix things up to make your HTML emails look and work right in the majority of situations. Counting Web-based email services, there are a lot more ways to view emails than there are to view Web pages. Protocol goes out the window.