Re: Creating HTML emails with mutt

[Stefan Hagen]

Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 06:28:34PM +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
I'll be working on this in the 'kevin/multipart-alternative' branch, 
but just fyi that I force-push to my development branches, and they 
are usually "work in progress".


I've merged the branch into master.  For those who want to give it a 
try, please see the documentation under "MIME Multipart/Alternative" 
.


This is interesting - I'm trying this...

I'm using this MIMEBellish script to transform plaintext mail to
multipart mail with HTML for a few years and it works quite well:
http://nosubstance.me/post/mutt-secret-sauce/

Personally, I find the change from text as WYSIWYG representation to
text as source code (markdown is source code in a way) challenging.
While I was able to just write an email and send it, it is now a process
of carefully "coding" an email, previewing, correcting, previewing,
sending...

Best Regards,
Stefan

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Re: Creating HTML emails with mutt

[martin f krafft]

Regarding the following, written by "Kevin J. McCarthy" on 2019-11-01 at 14:45 
Uhr +0800:
I've merged the branch into master.  For those who want to give it 
a try, please see the documentation under "MIME 
Multipart/Alternative" 
.


I've sent over 100 emails using this, and it's been working 
spotlessly.


If you want to quickly try it out, here's a [little script][1] I 
hacked up, which uses pandoc to create a `text/html` alternative by 
parsing your message as if it were Markdown.


[1]: https://git.madduck.net/etc/mutt.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/.mutt/markdown2html

Feedback welcome!

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Re: Creating HTML emails with mutt

[martin f krafft]

Regarding the following, written by "Stefan Hagen" on 2019-11-01 at 08:53 Uhr 
+0100:
While I was able to just write an email and send it, it is now a 
process of carefully "coding" an email, previewing, correcting, 
previewing, sending...


There's a lot of good things to be said about carefully crafting 
emails!


Regardless, to most of us who've been writing text/plain emails all 
of our lives, using ASCII characters for emphasis and hand-crafting 
numbered and itemised lists, Markdown will hardly even have a 
learning curve.


The only thing to watch out for is the "false positives", like I had 
the other day when part of an email of mine was interpreted by 
pandoc to be LaTeX math. I've since disabled the pandoc extension in 
[my script I use with mutt][1], though there remain quite a number 
of extensions allowing for funky corner case surprises, especially 
in quotes from other people! Fun times ahead!


[1]: https://git.madduck.net/etc/mutt.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/.mutt/markdown2html

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Re: Creating HTML emails with mutt

[Grant Edwards]

On 2019-11-01, Stefan Hagen  wrote:
>
>> .
>
> This is interesting - I'm trying this...
>
> I'm using this MIMEBellish script to transform plaintext mail to
> multipart mail with HTML for a few years and it works quite well:
> http://nosubstance.me/post/mutt-secret-sauce/
>
> Personally, I find the change from text as WYSIWYG representation to
> text as source code (markdown is source code in a way) challenging.
> While I was able to just write an email and send it, it is now a process
> of carefully "coding" an email, previewing, correcting, previewing,
> sending...

That is indeed the tradeoff.  The reward is that you get nice quoting,
lists, code-blocks, italics, bold, etc.  The cost is that it's more
work.  It's simpler to just create an HTML part by taking the
text/plain (with appropriate escaping) and shoving it inside
tags with trivial amount of CSS to pick a fixed font.  The
drawback to that is that paragraphs are not "flowable" by the renderer
and it looks like crap on narrow display (e.g. phones).

Another benifit to the markup-language apparoach is that for some
reason I find that when proof-reading something in a different
"format" I spot more errors than I do when proof-reading the "source"
as I typed it. I remember the same being true from my days using
TeX/LaTeX.  But that might just be me...

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