For my purposes, I chose to just leave the text alone since I don’t send out emails with boilerplate text in them anyway. Go ahead and add a signature at the bottom with your Web address or whatever you wish. At this point, you can also customize the “template text” that appears when you select the stationery in Mail. If you haven’t physically moved any of the files or changed the names, the HTML document should be perfect. Open the content.html file (if it’s not still open) to make sure your images have updated in the HTML. ![]() The bg_pattern.jpg file is what Mail tiles in the background of your email to fill the width and height of the entire Mail window, but the bg_letter.jpg overlays that, so the background in that file needs to mesh well with the background pattern. The background of the stationery actually resides in two different files. ![]() Keep the background simple unless you really know what you’re doing. As you can see in the image above, I created a completely new top.jpg file to replace the Sand Dollar and paper background. Obviously the file named top.jpg is the “masthead” of the template where you can place a logo, photo or whatever you wish. (see screenshot below) Customizing the stationery images You’ll want the borders (if you choose to have them) to line up on the top, letter background and bottom JPG files. NOTE: The width of the body of the message background is important. Once you’ve decided on your design, simply open each of the four. Now you just need to decide on what you want your stationery design to look like. If you look at the Sand Dollar stationery template in the Mail application, you’ll have an idea of how it all comes together. The Sand Dollar stationery is comprised of only a few graphics files: Make sure you save the file as plain text, and with the. You’ll want to use only characters and spaces (for whatever reason, when I used a hyphen or underscore it doesn’t work). Change that to whatever you wish to name your file. You’ll notice that near the top of the HTML code, the Title tag of the stationery (Sand Dollar) appears. Open the content.html file just to get an idea of the HTML structure of the final template file. Here you will see seven files and more language folders. Go ahead an open the Content/Resources folders until you see the basic files for the Stationery template. Finding the stationery art filesĪnother Finder window will open. Step 3Ĭontrol+Click (right-click) on the Sand Dollar.mailstationery file on your desktop and select Show Package Contents. We want to work on a copy of the file, not the original. Option-drag the Sand Dollar.mailstationery file to your desktop. You will see 8 files and some folders (how many folders depends on how many languages you have installed on your system). Go ahead and open the Stationery/Contents/Resources folder. Using Apple's own stationery as a starting point Step 2įor the sake of keeping it easy in this tutorial, I chose to base my customized email off of one of Apple’s built-in templates called Sand Dollar Stationery. They are Birthday, Announcements, Photos, Stationery, and Sentiments. Inside this folder, you’ll see five more folders named the way you see them in Mail when you click the Stationery button in the upper right corner of new emails. Navigate to the root level of your Macintosh hard drive and go to: Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources. Next, you’ll need a text editor that can save files as plain text Apple’s TextEdit will do, but you can use any one you wish. ![]() First, you’ll need a graphics editor I suggest Adobe Photoshop, but Pixelmator or any other app that allows you to save specific size files as JPG and PNG will do. You’ll need just a few things to create your own custom Mail stationery. For the sake of this tutorial though, I’ll keep it simple. Of course, if you have knowledge of HTML, you can do a lot more with your customization. ![]() This tutorial is fairly simple, and you’re only limitations are your graphics skills. You can create your own customized Mail stationery quite easily I decided it was about time that I took a look at it again to make sure nothing had changed with all the updates to Leopard, and the release of Snow Leopard. To this day, it’s still one of the most popular articles on this site. Back in 2007, I wrote a tutorial on how to create your own customized OS X Mail stationery when Leopard was first released.
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