The Entourage User's WebLog

So, your work colleague sent you a hilarious animated GIF graphic that you enjoyed so much. You went to send it to your best friend, but when you hit the 'Forward' button the formatting is lost. Worse still, when you send the graphic, you friend reports that the image isn't animated. What did you do wrong? Nothing!

Entourage has a relatively simple HTML engine built in that is used for display and editing of HTML content in 'simple' HTML messages. This limits the HTML available to fonts, sizes, colours and a few other relatively minor formatting attributes. This is the limit of what can be _created_ in Entourage.

However, when a more complex message arrives (something using tables or frames, for example), rather than failing to display it, the display is passed off to a more complex rendering engine (the 'Tasman' engine). This can display 'complex' HTML, but cannot create it.

Now, when your animated GIF arrived it was probably wrapped up in a complex HTML message (it must have been to be displayed animated). The display of the message was passed off to Tasman, which was capable of animating the GIF for you.

When you chose to forward the message, the new draft forwarded message was opened up using Entourage's more simple html editing engine. This strips out all the frames, tables etc that it can't handle (which is why you see formatting changes). When the message is sent, there is nothing in it to trigger the passing of the message to the Tasman engine on receipt, and the internal rendering engine can't animate GIFs.

The work round is to forward the original message as an attachment, which preserves the original 'complex html', but it may need the receiving client to open the attachment before they see the animation (this depends on their client and the format of the original message).

You can create and send original messages with animated GIFs in Entourage 2004, however. You do it this way:

1. Create a new word document containing the message you want to send. When you insert the animated GIF, put it into a word table - a 1 row x 1 column table will do fine.
2. Choose "send to > mail recipient (as HTML)" from the file menu
3. Address your message and send.

Now, recipients using Entourage will receive a complex HTML message that will be passed to the Tasman engine and have the GIF animated

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