How to stop Outlook from changing the justification of text from left aligned to fully justified.

The way to see the property to add to your HTML do the following:

1. Disable Typography in Outlook (File, Options, Mail, Editor Options, Advanced), typography improvements.
2. Send an email to yourself and then on that received email on the ribbon locate the Move column, More Move Actions, Other actions, View Source.
3. Look for DontUseAdvancedTypographyReadingMail

A good reference how to use this setting is this blog, Microsoft introduces controversial new “Advanced Typography” features for Outlook Classic | Knak

My company is starting to see this 'feature' turned on with the Windows 11 migration. Has anyone had any success implementing the <w:WordDocument> tag and can provide more documentation? I've never seen it before, and I'm concerned that it's saying that we're formatting the whole email as a Word Document. I haven't been able to find anybody else posting about how to fix it, so would appreciate links to resources.

Gabriel, as a reminder, full justification fails WCAG Understanding SC 1.4.8 (specifically the failure is F88). This has pretty serious ramifications. If a company sends a HTML email, that is part of a contract with stipulation to meet WCAG standards (i.e. most government contracts in Australia, at least), then they could be found to be in breach of contract.

Also, obviously, I trust WCAG much more than whatever internal survey Microsoft cooked up. It's beyond aesthetics or a personal preference, this does affect real people with accessibility needs Overall, it greatly reduces my trust in Microsoft, if you're making these big internet affecting changes without real evidence behind them.

Hi all,

Sorry for the delay getting back. I followed up with the Outlook and Word Teams about the email justification changing.  It turns out the changes we are seeing are mostly expected and not bugs.  The teams are implementing a feature called Automated Typography.  This feature applies read only changes to emails in the Outlook Reading Pane and Word’s Read Mode to make the content more impactful and easier to read.  Please keep an open mind about the feature and give it a chance. The product team has gotten some good examples from customers where the end result of their emails looked good, more professional, and were easier to read. I will ask if I can show some of those or if they can be added in a blog article. Thank you all for the feedback.

Next steps:

• Feature is being turned off for production Current Channel to address feedback, including if there could be an opt out mechanism 7/25/23.
• Product Team will publish an Insider blog explaining the feature and release info, https://insider.microsoft365.com/en-us/blog. 
• Re-enable the feature for Current Channel production TBD.

Ask:

• If you have examples where the feature is causing unexpected problems, please share those here in the forum thread and where possible, provide examples before and after, or open an In App ticket from Outlook Desktop, (Help, Contact Support). We have several tickets from some of you already and those have been shared to the product team.
• As a reminder the feature is still enabled for Office Insider channels, Beta Channel and Current Channel Preview to test further.  If you need to switch to Insider here is guidance:
  • Commercial/Business customers - Use a registry command to install Microsoft 365 Insider on Windows devices - Microsoft 365 Insider | Microsoft Learn
  • Consumer customers (Office Home, Office Family, etc.) - Join the Microsoft 365 Insider Program

What changes are applied to content with Automated Typography?

Research for the project showed that good design makes documents more believable, the authors more credible, and documents more actionable and easier to consume.  The feature's refinements apply intelligent, adaptive justification, kerning, and OpenType ligatures to the email in the reading pane.  These changes are applied automatically, without major layout changes, only when the layout scoring algorithm determines that the changes will improve the layout. 

• Full justification with adaptive, optimal paragraph algorithm. Full justification is one of the hallmarks of fine typography, and is present in most professional book, magazine, and editorial design. Aligning the text on both the right and left creates a clear box of the text, which in turn reinforces the graphic organization and underlying structure of the page. Good justification is difficult to get right, however, so we use a high-end “optimal paragraph” algorithm which tries many ways of laying out each line in a paragraph, and chooses the layout with the most even arrangement of whitespace over the whole paragraph. Our algorithm goes a step further and if it determines that a section’s layout score is worse with justification on than with it off, it will leave it off, giving the customer the best possible layout.
• OpenType kerning. If all letters were simply rectangles, typography would be easy. Letters (rectangles) would line up next to each other and have exactly the same visual space between them. But letters are not rectangles; they’re irregular. The capital T has a bunch of white space under it and if you just arranged letters based on their edges, then “Typography” would look more like “T ypography”. Kerning is a feature of fonts that adjusts the spacing between specific pairs to make them fit better visually. Another good example, consider the word “MUSTARD”: The capital A has the opposite problem to the T and has lots of space above it. Put them together with kerning, and the A tucks nicely under the T. Without kerning, it looks more like “MUST ARD”, which might slow readers thinking that it’s two words. More examples here.
• OpenType ligatures. The irregular shapes of letters can sometimes clash with each other. The hook on the lowercase f can smash into the dot on the i or j, or other f’s. The tail of a y can crash into a preceding g in edgy. Ligatures are a way of substituting two or more character with a single combined letter that is specifically drawn for that case. More examples here.