Many email clients open a message reader window that is not the full screen width. For this reason you will want to limit the width of your text messages to prevent lines from wrapping inappropriately. We suggest 75 as a maximum number of charcters per line. That way it is less likely that the recipient will see broken lines in the message. pssForm does not automatically insert End-Of-Line characters. So, the message width will be based on where you place the End-Of-Line characters. This occurs when you press the Enter or Return key on your keyboard.
You must use a text editor to create the Confirm Message Text File. A text editor is a program that does not add any kind of formatting and saves the file as ASCII text. Windows users can use Notepad, for Unix/Linux users there are many different text editors available.
There is a difference in the End-Of-Line characters used by Win32 and Unix/Linux systems. This is Operating System(OS) specific and depends on the OS used by the system that is running the pssForm application, usually your web server. You will have to be sure that your Confirm Message Text file is created with a text editor that uses the proper End-Of-Line character.
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pssForm uses a special HTML tag pair <!HIDE FROM CLIENT>....<EOHFC> to help format the confirm messages your user will recieve. These are not read by the web browser, so you can be as creative as you like with this tag pair.
If you find that your Confirm message web page is not displaying properly in certain browsers try starting out the confirm message text file with a </PRE> tag within the <!HIDE FROM CLIENT>....<EOHFC> element. For pssForm to properly display plain text it begins the HTML page with a <PRE> tag and ends with </PRE>. To bypass this behavior do this in your Confirm Message Text File:
<!HIDE FROM CLIENT> </PRE> ... Web page elements <PRE> <EOHFC> ... Text Message Note that you must re-establish the <PRE> element before ending the HIDE FROM ClIENT section because some browsers will fail to display the page with mis-matched element tags.
With creative use of the HIDE FROM CLIENT element you can have totally different messages for the user in the browser and via email. Incorporating an HTML comment tag pair(<!-- -->) in the confirm message text file adds this functionality. Simply open the HTML comment element with a HIDE FROM CLIENT element; type your email message; then close the HTML comment element within a second HIDE FROM CLIENT element. See this sample Confirm Message Text file:
<!HIDE FROM CLIENT> //Hide from client tag </PRE> //kill the pssForm PRE tag //web page content <p>Your application has been recieved. You will recieve an email with further instructions. <i><b>You must reply to the email</b></i> to confirm your request and intiate further processing of your application. <!-- //open an HTML comment element <EOHFC> //Close the Hide from client section //Type the email message Thank you for applying for our services. For your security, we will not begin processing your application until we recieve a reply to this email. Using the 'Reply to' feature of your email program, reply to this message with the password you want to use to access our services. The password must be eight characters in length. <!HIDE FROM CLIENT> //Open another Hide from client section --> //Close the HTML comment element <PRE> //Return the PRE tag to balance the element tags <EOHFC> //Close this Hide from Client section The line comments (//...) have been added for explanation purposes and would not work in a Confirm Message File.