Edit preferences by choosing Preferences from the Email menu. The dialog box contains field for many global settings.

New Document Dimensions : This controls the default width and height of new documents created with Email Effects. The width will also be used when opening text documents created with other application. Although most systems can theoretically handle a width of 80 characters, it is safer to stick with 74 or less. The number of rows will always be automatically increased if necessary.

Ruler Color : This controls the color in which the horizontal and vertical rulers will be displayed at the left and top of each document. The scaling on these rulers can be edited by dragging from inside the rulers.

Background and Foreground : These control the color to use for the background (blank page) and foreground (drawings) of documents. By default, they are white and black respectively.

Font : This controls the font and size to use for all displaying documents. Only fixed-width fonts are allowed as others will produce distorted results in Email messages. It is recommended to set this to the same as your Email package so that the results look consistent.

Custom Picture Characters : If checked, pictures are converted using the characters specified, otherwise Email Effects will automatically choose characters that will look good. In both cases, pictures are automatically contrasted and sampled for darkness before being converted to text.

Allow non-ASCII characters : This allows the full Macintosh characters range (values 0 to 255) to be used for drawing in emails. Foreign, or other specialty users may wish to use this setting, however it is not recommended for general use.

Message Prefix : Email Effects adds this before outgoing messages (and text copied to the clipboard) to help recipients whose email software is not configured to view text in a fixed-width font. It is always worth using a fixed-width font such as Courier or Monaco in Email software for technical and historical reasons.