Is it possible to create an image map in an HTML e-mail (especially Microsoft Office Outlook?)

October 22, 2007 9:32 AM

Is it possible to create an image map in an HTML e-mail (especially Microsoft Office Outlook?) Is there a best way to go about this?

I don't need to do anything else or have any other fancy goodies, such as rollovers, etc. I'd just like to do clickable hotspots on an image. I don't know if I need to get into the source code at all -- or even how -- with Outlook.

Thanks!

posted by branparsons to computers & internet (3 comments total)

It must be possible because I've gotten image-map HTML spam. I'd guess the best way to do it is make the HTML in a program more suited to that sort of thing and then e-mail the result. Outlook &c use the associated HTML browser to look at these things so if it works in IE it will probably show up correctly in Outlook.
posted by TeatimeGrommit at 9:36 AM on October 22, 2007

Most of the legit e-mail I get that uses images with clickable hotspots seems to carve the images into separate files for each region. I'd guess this is a more reliable method, but maybe they just do it that way so they can have separate alt-text for each region in case people have the images turned off.
posted by Good Brain at 9:50 AM on October 22, 2007

Pasting from a browser into Outlook seems to be the only way to inject any useful code into it. From what I've seen, there's no way to get into the pseudo-code.

My advice is to make it in basic HTML (tutorial), since javascript, css, and all of the other goodies aren't reliable in Outlook, especially since it now uses the Word page renderer instead of IE. Make sure your image is referenced from a definite internet address in the html, not just a local computer folder. Get your map up, and then Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C from the browser and paste it into your Outlook email.

On preview: Good Brain's advice sounds good, too, but you'll have to use a slicing program like photoshop to achieve it. Or do it by hand. (shudder)
posted by cowbellemoo at 9:55 AM on October 22, 2007