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rosshutsFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Printing problem with HTML Formatted text emails.

Dear Experts,

I am having a very annoying problem with Outlook 2002(XP) and wondered if anyone can help at all?

I have a user that is trying to print out an email and when he looks at the printed page it has shrunk the email to a very small size. If you have an email with lots of replies and print it out in HTML format (that was the format it was sent or received from a contact) you can see it has made sure that it has fitted the content to one page. However the writting is so small you can barely read it.

I have also tried to print preview the document and had no luck as I get an error message stating "Print Preview is not available for HTML formatted items".

I have changed the Mail format under options to Rich Text and even plain text and still no luck as I noticed that you can print preview a normal formatted email. Also if I print a normal email it show the format exactly how should do.

Under the printer properties I have tried to make sure that "fit to page" has been selected etc and still no joy.

I also considered that it may be due to me installing IE7 (not beta version) on the machine as the user wanted to use it, but I have checked the problem on one of our citrix servers that is running IE6 and the problem still occurs.

I am using XP Professional SP2 with Office XP Service Pack 3.

I have looked around microsofts website and can't seem to find a solution.

Can anyone help me at all as I can't see that it is acceptable to have us printing a HTML formatted text email with really really small text.

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Ross.
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Karen Falandays
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Hi Ross, I am confused. By choosing to fit to one page, of course it will be small. Did you say that you have tried de-selecting the fit to one page option?
kfalandays
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ASKER

Hi There,

Apologies! You are correct in assuming that I tried to de-select the "Fit to one page" option.

I hope this helps.

Many thanks,
Ross.
Hey guys, I was just looking at this issue and posted some stuff on my blog. Here is the most recent post:

Several users reported to me recently that printing messages from outlook, randomly, has started to do so in very small font. According to various techno-posts the reason is the recent Internet Explorer 7.0 Update. Its not all html emails however. It appears to be html emails formatted in previous versions of office... ie... office 2000 and office 2002 html authored emails printed with ie 7 are screwed up (according to one post). Here are some potential ways to fix it:


1) You can disable font styles: Open Internet Options. On the general tab, click the Accessibility button. Check mark "Ignore font styles specified on webpages".This will allow you to print headers on HTML emails.

2) Another user suggested a less practical approach:
He was able to print e-mails fine after doing the following:-Tools, options-In preferences tab, click e-mail options...-Under Message Handling, check "Read all standard mail in plain text"-Restart oulook, and you should be able to print e-mails fine.

3) This Microsoft KB Article deals with a similar problem that happene dafter IE 5.5 was introduced. Click on the Link to go to the Microsoft site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/276435

4) Still working on additional Stuff
Hi,

Thanks for your help!

I tried option one and it still won't let you open "print preview" and still prints out in really small text. I can't find the tick box that was mentioned in option 2. Not sure if that applies to version 2003 as we are running outlook XP. I also tried downloading IE6 on the specified users PC and sadly you cannot roleback to previous versions!

Any other ideas?

Regards,
Ross.



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RodLampart

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Inuyashapl

This is a known issue with ie 7.
Install hotfix 932538 and then do the following:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit.exe, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate the following registry key, and then click this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_STF_Scale_Min
3. For Outlook 2003, double-click Outlook.exe in the details pane, type 75 in the Value data box, and then click OK.

Notes" You can type any number from 30 to 100. The number that you type represents the minimum scaling percentage that will be used by the "Shrink to Fit" feature. For example, when you type 75, the message will not be printed at any smaller than 75 percent of the original message size.
" If the Outlook.exe value is missing, you must create it. To do this, follow these steps:a.  On the Edit menu, point to New, click DWORD Value, type Outlook.exe, and then press ENTER.
b.  Double-click Outlook.exe, type 75, and then click OK.
 
 
4. For Outlook Express in Microsoft Windows XP, double-click Msimn.exe in the details pane, type 75 in the Value data box, and then click OK.

Notes" You can type any number from 30 to 100. The number that you type represents the minimum scaling percentage that will be used by the "Shrink to Fit" feature. For example, when you type 75, the message will not be printed at any smaller than 75 percent of the original size for the message.
" If the Msimn.exe value is missing, you must create it. To do this, follow these steps:a.  On the Edit menu, point to New, click DWORD Value, type Msimn.exe, and then press ENTER.
b.  Double-click Msimn.exe, type 75, and then click OK.
 
 
Change the dword key from hex to dec using dec coding (ie. 5a=90 in hex)
Restart outlook and your wrapped headers issue is gone. Worked for company.
Windows XP pro SP3 removes FEATURE_STF_Scale_Min  registry key. Be careful don't upgrade to SP3 yet.
Hi all,

One thing that I found out in my time as Help Desk Support - which has come in handy many times in my life is this...

***
Outlook calls on / uses Internet Explorer to print HTML formatted emails.
***

See my blog for full details:
http://snafder.blogspot.com/2008/08/printing-emails-from-outlook-issue.html
( snafder.blogspot.com -> Search for Printing emails from Outlook issue )

In short, for HTML format emails - you can change Outlook's print settings / page setup until you are blue in the face - but nothing will change.
Solution, open IE, and modift the 'Page Setup' there.

This should fix most issues related to printing HTML format emails in Outlook.

Hope this helps