Following the launch of the iPad in the UK last month, our partners at Litmus have added the iPad to the list of mobile email clients available to preview your email on.

Take a look at how your message will appear on the iPad and you might be pleasantly surprised. In addition to supporting new web standards such at HTML 5, the iPad also has images on be default when an email is previewed or opened which is a massive bonus. Rendering emails on the iPad shouldn't cause too many problems either as it uses the Safari rendering engine. So, if your email renders nicely in Safari then it should look the same on the iPad.

However, one thing to be aware of on both the iPad and iPhone is the auto scaling of small fonts up to 12px. This can cause problems in any campaign that uses fonts smaller than 12px, for example, in navigation links or overlayed text. When the text scales it can break the template and cause unforeseen problems.

As an example I've changed the menu bar below to alternate between 10px and 12px text. The preview below is shown in Outlook 2007.

You can clearly see the different sized fonts. The same code displayed on an iPad would look like this.

As you can see the 10px font has been scaled upto 12px so that all the headings look the same size. Now, if I add the following code to disable auto scaling fonts:

style='-webkit-text-size-adjust:none'

the menu headings look exactly as we would expect them to.

More details about font styling for the iPad can be found here but in general its a good idea to keep your fonts 12px or above wherever possible.