Create Document

The Create Document page has the following elements:

Name
(required) You enter the internal name of the document. This name will only be used within the administrator screens - list members will never see it. If you want to create multiple language versions of the same document, they must each have exactly the same Name, but each has a different Language setting. ListManager will then see them as different language versions of the same document.

Language
(required) You select the language in which this document is written. If multiple language version of a document exist, ListManager will try to use the most appropriate document for that person. It will look at the country code of the person's TCP/IP address, and determine which languages that country uses. It will then look for the document in the languages that country uses. If it finds no match, ListManager will use either the English language version of the document (if multiple language versions exist, but none match the person's language) or the first document which matches the needed title.

Type
(required) Determines the type of document this is. The type determines in what contexts this document will appear as a viable choice. For instance, the Hello: setting for a mailing list defines the document mailed to new subscribers. Only documents of type HELLO will be displayed as choices in that field.

Title
(required) This is the native language title of the document. When this document is sent via email, this title will be in the Subject Line of the message.

Body
(required) This is the actual text of the message. When this document is sent via email, this field will be the Contents of the email message. If any lines are longer than 75 characters long they will be automatically word-wrapped when saved.

Additional Headers
(advanced) The contents of this field will be added to the header of the outgoing message. This field is primarily used for creating documents with alternative character sets and content types. By default, no content-type or character set information is included when sending documents. Most mail clients will default to a standard character set which may not support the characters that were used to compose the message. If a document contains characters that aren't able to be represented by the standard character set, you must specify the character set information in the Additional Headers field.

For example, to use the ISO standard Central European character set in a document, the following lines must be inserted into the Additional Headers field:

Content-Type: text/plain;

charset="iso-8859-2"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Other content-types are available. To determine which content-type specification you need, try using the technique explained below in the ‘Creating Unicode, HTML, and multipart messages’ section.

These lines do not affect the contents of the Body field so the text in this field will be in whatever character set is the default for your system. As a consequence, when viewing your message in the web interface, you may see different characters than what you entered.

For single-byte character sets, you should be able to cut-and-paste the text of your message into the web interface directly. In general, this will not work for multi-byte character sets, such as Unicode. Multi-byte character sets require a different technique, which is described below.

Creating Unicode, HTML, and multipart messages
Unicode, HTML, and multipart messages require special encoding and header specifications to function properly. The following procedure will allow you to create documents of these types with proper encoding.

First, compose your message as you would like it to be viewed by the users. Send that message to yourself at an account where the email client you use to access that account has the capability of viewing raw message text. For example, Microsoft Outlook Express has this capability but Microsoft Outlook doesn't. Alternatively, some mail clients will let you view the sent message’s raw message text. You can also obtain this information from the ListManager InMail queue. Set up a test list and send a message to that list in your alternate character set or multi-part HTML. Then pull the header and body content from the InMail queue.

Next, find the Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding lines in the header of the message and add them to the Additional Headers field. You can then cut-and-paste the raw message contents into the Body field of your document. The message content may be encoded in such a way that it isn't readable but will usually be correctly decoded by the mail client that reads it. Not all mail clients have this capability. Web based mail clients may not be able to render alternate character sets at all. You should carefully test and review the message content before using it in production.