Hey Straight Dope news writers, writer writers, and other writers near and far, I have a question. Don’t need answer fast.
I write a newsletter at work for my Military and Allies Resource group at my job. It’s quarterly, not a big pressure situation, and I have the two chairs of the resource group edit it before I send it out. I get really good feedback from one of the chairs (and I appreciate the feedback) but she often suggests adding links to the newsletter. Links to our internal sites and whatnot. I really don’t like adding links and the only reason I can think of is that (deadtree) newspapers don’t have links and I think the pages look “cleaner” without links. Our newsletter is not a newspaper, of course, it’s sent out as a PDF to an email group. It’s not printed and handed out in the lobby or anything.
I’m not working at the moment, but I produced a technical journal, mostly e-distributed, for seven years, so here’s my two cents: links don’t have to make the pages look messy if you do them right.
Obviously, you don’t want to do them like this: htt ps://b oards. straightdope. com/t/should-i-put-links-in-my-newsletter/929389.
But you can do them like this. I assume that, depending on the software you are using for layout, you can also control the color scheme or other signals that you use to indicate that something is a live link. Just choose something that is visible to someone reading the text, but that doesn’t catch the eye from a distance. Do that, and of course don’t clutter up the text with an excessive number of links, and you should be fine.
That only addresses the aesthetics, however. Your starting point should be optimizing content, with aesthetic decisions to be based on what works best with content. If you agree that the links make sense substantively, and are only tempted to reject the idea because of how the links will look, you should try to make it work. OTOH, if you dislike the idea of links for substantive reasons that you can justify, don’t do it.
If the entire link is spelled out in the middle of a paragraph, yeah, that’s ugly. But why not hide them inside the pdf, with only a word like “(link)” or “click here”, like here on SDMB. I love it when I can easily get additional info on whatever the author is writing about.
Yep, I would do that - I should have made that clear in the OP that I would add a hyperlink with a clickable key word.
And my wife agreed with adding them in as well. Maybe I should just get the F over it.
I think another reason is that I’ve had issues with links when converting to PDF. I’ve seen them get all jacked up before but I can’t remember specifically when.
Also FYI I put it all together in Publisher and then convert to PDF.
I’d be pissed if I was the reader and you left out links to important stuff because you didn’t like their appearance.
Hell, set the urls out in long form in numbered footnotes if the visual flow of your prose is so precious. Wiki does this so it’s not like your audience has never seen that convention.
BTW, here on this new SDMB board, it looks to me like the links are the exact same color as the text. The only way I can be sure that it’s a link is because the mousepointer changes from an arrow to a hand. Is that how it looks to you others? Or do I need to change a setting somewhere?
Under most Discourse themes links are real subtle. The color is different, but with no underline the very very dark blue link text versus the standard black text just doesn’t stand out.
To counteract that, when I put an imbedded link to e.g. a wiki page I bold the words. I also try to write the prose so the fact a link is there is obvious. Not just a subtle drive-by.
We can also underline, but that means hand typing the relevant BBCode [u]whatever[/u] manually. Bolding is easier because Ctrl-B or the bold icon on the edit control panel are available.
I know the decision’s already been made, but I would say that one of the biggest advantages of having a digital newsletter is the ability to add links. Otherwise just kill some trees and be done with it.
In our corporate newsletter I use words to clearly indicate embedded links. I don’t like to depend on formatting to indicate links.
I’ve also noted and agree with this criticism of Discourse link appearance, at least with the theme I’m using (one of the SDMB custom themes). My typical strategy has been to make sure to include an entire phrase, like this in the text rather than just one word or two, then it becomes more noticeable.
Back in the day the stories were legion of execs who insisted their secretary print out the exec’s incoming email so he (always he) could read them on paper as he’d been accustomed to since WWII. And then arrange his pile of papers for filing, action, etc.
If you do have an audience member who still prints to read, that person won’t gain the benefit of the links, but they also won’t be harmed by them. Just like encountering an embedded bit of foreign language or some Chinese characters, their eye just skims over the {blah blah blah, whatever; don’t matter to me} stuff unconsciously.
Actually, bare url’s are deprecated on Wikipedia, in part because it contributes to link rot. If you click on a link and get 404, it may be hard to update it. But if you set out the link in a key word or title, then a subsequent editor has more to work with to update it. Can google the key word or title and see if there’s another updated link to the topic.