Why can I no longer specify my preferred font for text which has a link attached to it?

Question

I use TBird to send old school, professional looking business letters with logo image header and footers. Recently, I am unable to apply my preferred font to the website link part of my footer. This seems to have become an issue after one of the more recent upgrades of TBird. Its frustrating as I feel good graphic design requires uniformity in font style/type and size. This seems no longer possible. Now when I attach a hyperlink to my website address it changes my preferred font to something that looks like Arial and locks both font and size. It looks crappy.

Answer 1

''Kits47 [[#answer-701080|said]]''
<blockquote>
The only way I know its 12 pt. is that I copy into Word and check the font size there.
</blockquote>
Huge error number one, and probably cause of your problem in the first place.
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I would really like to see TBird use point size for fonts.
</blockquote>
Thunderbird uses HTML, HTML is expressed in pixels.
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In terms of not having Papyrus on you Linux box, I suppose that's you're choice.
</blockquote>
Licensing actually, not choice. The font is licensed and distributed by Microsoft. See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/font.aspx?FMID=1113 for a list of products your recipient can install to get the font.
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In my outgoing email subject line I always specify that my reply is best viewed in HTML, full screen.
</blockquote>
HTML is the default for almost all mail so that does appear to be overkill. Full screen. Personally I would be just as likely to not read mail that required full screen. Mail gets about half a screen here.
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Most systems will automatically substitute fonts for ones not on that system, at least in Apple and PC systems. </blockquote>
Papurus actually has a higher chance of being present on a Mac system than a windows one as Apple have distributed it with OSX since 2003.
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Anyway all of that is a little off topic. I wanted help with why TBird intermittently messes with font size and style when I cut and pasting email responses to people.
</blockquote>
As I said at the beginning. Do not use word. Word first converts to RTF then to HTML (All done internally) The resulting HTML is extremely complex and to put it bluntly pastes as a whole page from which Thunderbird must extract only the relevant parts. (inside the body tag) The end result is the program ends up confused about what goes where.
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And, if there is some reason why sometimes, again I stress sometimes, it will not let me use the font of my choice for text that has a hyperlink attached to it.
</blockquote>
If your pasting from Word the most obvious thing will be that the hyperlinked text will have it's own font tags another reason I suggest you use the program your in.
* If you want it on paper use a word processor. It is what they are designed for
* If you want it in email use the email program to actually write your mail.
* If you want to guarantee the look on delivery send PDF attachments.