A reply, a forward and a new email leave with the formatting you see as you write them: colors, fonts, sizes and tables reach your recipient as they are, whether they read in Gmail, Outlook or another email program.
The formatting bar
With a mouse or a trackpad, the bar above the text offers “Bold”, “Italic”, “Underline” and “Insert link”, then “Text color” and “Highlight”, then the two lists. The last button, marked Aa, is called “More formatting”. It opens a second row:
- “Font” and “Size”, which show the font and size of the text at the cursor;
- “Strikethrough”;
- “Align left”, “Center” and “Align right”;
- “Table”;
- “Clear formatting”.
The second row stays open from one email to the next until you reload the page.
On a phone or a tablet, or in a very narrow window, the bar keeps “Bold”, “Italic”, “Underline”, “Insert link” and the Aa button. Everything else is in the panel it opens from the bottom of the screen. A choice applies to the text you had selected, then the panel closes and you carry on where you were.
Colors and highlight
“Text color” and “Highlight” open a palette of named colors: each swatch says its name when you hover over it, and a screen reader reads it. The text colors stay readable on a white background. “Default” puts the normal text color back, “None” removes the highlight.
For an exact color, your logo’s for example, “Other color…” opens your device’s color picker. The bar’s button shows the current color under its letter, and its name says it too.
Fonts and sizes
“Font” offers six fonts that every email program can display. “Size” offers four choices: “Small”, “Normal”, “Large” and “Huge”. The default font and size are not written into the email: your recipient then reads it in their own program’s font, like an email written without formatting.
Tables
In “Table”, “Insert table” adds a table of three rows and three columns, with its borders. The Tab key moves to the next cell, and Tab in the last cell adds a row.
With the cursor in a table, the same menu offers to insert a row or a column on either side, to delete the row or the column, and “Delete table”. A table pasted from another email or a document can be changed the same way, merged cells included.
What a copy and paste keeps
Text pasted from a web page, Gmail, Outlook, Word or Google Docs keeps its colors, highlight, fonts, sizes and tables. Trupeo removes what an email program could not display, and what only repeats the default look, so that a pasted line looks like a typed one.
A very large table, such as a newsletter’s, is pasted as text, without its grid. Trupeo tells you so.
Starting again from plain text
Two ways:
- Paste without formatting. On a computer, Cmd + Shift + V (Ctrl + Shift + V on Windows) pastes the words only.
- Clear it afterwards. Select the text, then “Clear formatting”: colors, fonts, sizes, alignment, margins and a table’s cell styles go. Links too. On a phone or a tablet, this is the only way: the button is at the bottom of the Aa panel.