On Friday 03 May 2019 09:50:10 Steven D'Aprano wrote:

Please keep unrelated questions in seperate emails.

On Fri, May 03, 2019 at 09:26:34AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

...

2nd is, is there any way to insert an image so that is seen by the receiver with the next line of text after being a continuation of the message, like a caption for that image? The last time I tried inserting an image at the cursor I got about 6 black boxes that had nothing in the echo from a list that does take inline images from winderz machines.

Context?

What sort of message? Instant Messenger? IRC? Email? Posting on a Wordpress blog? Something else?

Normal kmail generated email msg, inserting a jpeg or png in the middle of whats basically a text msg doesn't work, only gets about 6 blank squares in the src text, and which do not make it thru the malling list in the returning echo from the listserver, whereas an attached .jpeg does. But then there is no way to caption the individual image.

If you're talking about email, I think you need to send a HTML message but the details of what goes in the HTML are beyond me. If it isn't documented and googling doesn't help, the best thing may be to grab somebody else's email which renders using inline images, and see what the HTML looks like. (Generally the answer is "horrific".)

Agreed. It should have an assigned Excedrin headache number. :) But in a text msg, isn't that what a mime boundary trigger and its following mime command is supposed to do??? Thats not nearly so ugly, and its a long time, very well defined protocol...

Cheers, Gene Heskett

On Saturday 04 May 2019 04:22:52 pm deloptes wrote:

Gene Heskett wrote:

...

1st Q is "deb line to install the whole TDE to stretch"?

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install tde-trinity From https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/DebianInstall

...

2nd is, is there any way to insert an image so that is seen by the receiver with the next line of text after being a continuation of the message, like a caption for that image?  The last time I tried inserting an image at the cursor I got about 6 black boxes that had nothing in the echo from a list that does take inline images from winderz machines.

When you use text mode - is unlikely - I never tried drag and drop to the text window. I always attach the image, but now I tried drag and drop and it creates attachment properly

Nomenclature fail, I want to include an image inline so that I can describe what the image is in the following text. Attachments have worked fine for yonks, but I am refering to the "message->insert file", and "message->insert file recent" pulldowns.

I'd demo here, but just installed stretch and have not yet copied my Pictures directory to the new 2T drive.

Seems like this should be properly handled by mime? Not (spit) html.

Cheers, Gene

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On Sun, May 05, 2019 at 07:00:14AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

Nomenclature fail, I want to include an image inline so that I can describe what the image is in the following text.

You want an embedded image?

# === begin message ===

Hi, we've just got back from holidays in sunny Aleppo, we had a wonderful time. Apparently the local government doesn't like tourists, we had a devil of a time getting to the city, but we made it eventually.

<embedded picture>

That's us with a lovely gentleman who helped us get into the city. We're standing by the side of his pickup. He must be some kind of hunter, judging by the number of guns he was carrying.

<embedded picture>

Here we are in the main street. The city must be having a construction boom, everywhere we went we saw buildings in the process of being demolished. I must say we weren't impressed by the worker's slack attitude to carting away the rubble.

# === end message ===

Something like that?

Attachments have worked fine for yonks, but I am refering to the "message->insert file", and "message->insert file recent" pulldowns.

The Insert File commands are used to insert text files into the body of a text email. Alas in the version of Kmail I have, it makes no attempt to distinguish between text files and arbitrary binary files, and will make a (very ineffective) attempt to embed the binary data into the message, with useless results.

As far as I can see, it doesn't do what you want.

[...]

Seems like this should be properly handled by mime? Not (spit) html.

I think you misunderstand the technology.

An email consists roughly of a bunch of header lines (text), followed by one or more chunks of data (attachments). The body of the email is itself an attachment. MIME is the mechanism used to announce what kind of data each attachment is: text, JPEG, HTML, something else.

You can't embed an binary image (say, a JPEG) in the middle of a text file, because "plain text" has no internal structure to say "this is an image, this is a PDF, this is bold text, this line is centered". You can't open a text file in, say, KWrite, and tell it to embed a JPEG in the middle of the text. That's bit a failure of KWrite, that's a limitation of the plain text format, and that applies equally to plain text attachments in emails.

To embed an image within a body of text, you need some kind of "rich text format" like a Word or LibreOffice document, or Microsoft's RTF, or the dreaded HTML.

Word and LibreOffice docs are themselves binary format, so they can literally embed the image within the document itself, giving you a single file. But HTML is a plain text format, so it cannot (or at least not efficiently), so you need a seperate image attachment, while the HTML simply says "use this attached image here".

There are other plain text formats capable of displaying images inline, such as ReST (ReStructured Text) but no email client I know of supports them.

If you expect people reading the document to read it inside their mail client, rather than to save the file and open it in an external application, it needs to be a format which most mail clients understand. And that, I think, limits you to HTML.

(There may be proprietary formats only understood by certain mail clients, e.g. Lotus Notes, Exchange, etc. but if you want a de facto standard, that means HTML.)

In order to get the effect you want, you need a mail client capable of both of these:

1. Using HTML (or, theoretically, some other format);

2. Embedding an image inside the HTML.

(To be precise: the image itself is an attachment, part of the email but not physically embedded inside the HTML; but a reference to the attachment is embedded in the HTML. In a manner of speaking, the HTML says "See here for image" and the mail client displays that image in place.)

As far as I can tell, Kmail supports 1 but not 2 so you're out of luck unless you want to hand-craft a valid HTML file (good luck with that!), or use another mail client. Perhaps Thunderbird?

On Sunday 05 May 2019 09:10:45 pm Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Sun, May 05, 2019 at 07:00:14AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

...

Nomenclature fail, I want to include an image inline so that I can describe what the image is in the following text.

You want an embedded image?

# === begin message ===

Hi, we've just got back from holidays in sunny Aleppo, we had
a wonderful time. Apparently the local government doesn't like
tourists, we had a devil of a time getting to the city, but we
made it eventually.

<embedded picture>

That's us with a lovely gentleman who helped us get into the
city. We're standing by the side of his pickup. He must be some
kind of hunter, judging by the number of guns he was carrying.

<embedded picture>

Here we are in the main street. The city must be having a
construction boom, everywhere we went we saw buildings in the
process of being demolished. I must say we weren't impressed
by the worker's slack attitude to carting away the rubble.

# === end message ===

Something like that?

...

Attachments have worked fine for yonks, but I am refering to the "message->insert file", and "message->insert file recent" pulldowns.

The Insert File commands are used to insert text files into the body of a text email. Alas in the version of Kmail I have, it makes no attempt to distinguish between text files and arbitrary binary files, and will make a (very ineffective) attempt to embed the binary data into the message, with useless results.

As far as I can see, it doesn't do what you want.

[...]

...

Seems like this should be properly handled by mime? Not (spit) html.

I think you misunderstand the technology.

An email consists roughly of a bunch of header lines (text), followed by one or more chunks of data (attachments). The body of the email is itself an attachment. MIME is the mechanism used to announce what kind of data each attachment is: text, JPEG, HTML, something else.

You can't embed an binary image (say, a JPEG) in the middle of a text file, because "plain text" has no internal structure to say "this is an image, this is a PDF, this is bold text, this line is centered". You can't open a text file in, say, KWrite, and tell it to embed a JPEG in the middle of the text. That's bit a failure of KWrite, that's a limitation of the plain text format, and that applies equally to plain text attachments in emails.

To embed an image within a body of text, you need some kind of "rich text format" like a Word or LibreOffice document, or Microsoft's RTF, or the dreaded HTML.

Word and LibreOffice docs are themselves binary format, so they can literally embed the image within the document itself, giving you a single file. But HTML is a plain text format, so it cannot (or at least not efficiently), so you need a seperate image attachment, while the HTML simply says "use this attached image here".

There are other plain text formats capable of displaying images inline, such as ReST (ReStructured Text) but no email client I know of supports them.

If you expect people reading the document to read it inside their mail client, rather than to save the file and open it in an external application, it needs to be a format which most mail clients understand. And that, I think, limits you to HTML.

(There may be proprietary formats only understood by certain mail clients, e.g. Lotus Notes, Exchange, etc. but if you want a de facto standard, that means HTML.)

In order to get the effect you want, you need a mail client capable of both of these:

1. Using HTML (or, theoretically, some other format);

2. Embedding an image inside the HTML.

(To be precise: the image itself is an attachment, part of the email but not physically embedded inside the HTML; but a reference to the attachment is embedded in the HTML. In a manner of speaking, the HTML says "See here for image" and the mail client displays that image in place.)

As far as I can tell, Kmail supports 1 but not 2 so you're out of luck unless you want to hand-craft a valid HTML file (good luck with that!), or use another mail client. Perhaps Thunderbird?

Not so easy to learn as it does almost everything bass ackwards from what I am used to. I know folks who've gotten used to it and are quite productive with it. I've even used it when out on the road playing visiting fireman at some other tv station where it took some time to make sure the fixes I put in place, stayed in place because I taught them how to do it better. I don't know if t-bird can do #2, but it seems to me a mime break and a new treatment for the binary data being loaded could be written, the mimetype already exists and has for 2 decades and it would never have to be in the same room as html.

IMO m$ and html have wrecked email by convincing todays generation that html, with its 5x multiplication of message size, is the only game in town. It should not be. A mime boundary break is rarely over 250 chars, adding maybe 500 bytes to ID to the mail agent what the next block of binary is. But a couple of 250 byte mime boundary's can surround a 4 megabyte jpeg straight out of my camera, very high def, and an expansion of the total message size for the boundary strings isn't even pocket change compared to the cost of html for the same thing.

I guess that displays my age.

Cheers, Gene Heskett