Email Rendering on Microsoft Surface Device

[Jaime_Servaes]

Most of my associates are now using Microsoft surface devices, as that's what our company is transitioning to. However some co-workers, my boss specifically, the emails render bad on her device. I've tested the emails on Litmus and EmailOnAcid and reassured them that they do render okay.  But has anyone else had this issue with surface devices? They are viewing on the surface using Outlook 2013.  Here is what the email looks like for her:

It should look like this:

[Josh_Hill13]

Outlook has a number of issues with this situation that a skilled coder can resolve with VML (i think).

CMOs need to remember that emails are fluid and not every device can be accounted for. And does your audience use Surface all the time??

[Grégoire_Miche2]

+1 on Josh, and within outlook, 2013 is especially painful.

What template are you using? If it's a Marketo one, you might be able to get some help from them.

-Greg

[Jennifer_Braath]

We are also experiencing this issue with emails not rendering properly on Surface devices.  It is challenging for us as Microsoft is our client (and many of them use a Surface).  We see that images may or may not render properly and parts of the email cut off.

We have a highly skilled web pro team and are using custom templates that our sr. web developer created.  We see the issues on multiple templates and unfortunately our web pro team has not been able to resolve the issue.

Has anyone made any progress with this issue?

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Jennifer,

To answer this specifically, there are some workarounds based on what you're having issues with. I just replied to this talking about zoom issues, but if you're working with a large group of Surface users, there's some tactics for scaling images using DPI settings and dynamic measurements.

Just to warn you, though: it's a massive pain. As long as you're using consistent image sizes it's not too bad, but if you plan on using diverse images it may be easier to just forego them.

[Casey_Grimes]

Been there, done that--the reason there's an issue with Surface tablets is that they have a screen zoom that does not scale accordingly, so you get the odd cutoff that you're seeing. The majority of tablets are shipped pre-zoomed, and in this case, it looks like 125%. It can be adjusted via display settings back to 100%. Then it will look correct again.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Same thing with most Windows laptops - at least corporate-provided ones.  But we overcame this long ago (actually Marketo did by not stripping out the required code in the templates) - all email templates should include the required code to accommodate Windows scaling:

Marketo is rewriting/omitting a significant amount of code in our responsive emails within the HEAD ...

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Dan,

Unfortunately, DPI scaling will only affect corporate laptops that have the 120DPI setting for Outlook; this particular bug happens to be independent of that because Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided to make zooming scale correctly in Outlook but not when using a zoomed view with Outlook.

For this particular issue with image width/height definitions you're basically stuck figuring out how to arbitrarily calculate the em equivalents based on the system zoom. I've only ever done 125% but I actually ran into someone who had a 200% a week ago.