Quoth Amit Ramon on Wednesday, 08 December 2010: > Hello list, > > I'd like to announce a new tool that I developed that allows sending > HTML-formatted mail from within Mutt. I know... being a Mutt's user > already means we are no big fans of HTML mail, but I had some reasons > for developing this tool, as I shall explain now. > > I'm using Mutt as my main mail reader/writer for a couple of years now > and am very pleased with it. My only problem was when communicating > with people who are using web-mail for reading their mail. I'm writing > lots of mails in Hebrew, which is a right-to-left language. It seems > that many web-mail clients are not handling text/plain messages (this > is basically what Mutt sends) in some situations. The reason for that, > AFAIK, is that they just don't know the language direction and have to > make an arbitrary decision. Gmail, for example, seems to be basing > this decision on the UI language setting. If the user, for instance, > sets the language to English, a text/plain message will be > left-aligned, no matter in which language it is written. When the text > mixes words in both RTL and LTR languages, the order of the words > might be wrong. The same would happen if the UI languages is set to > Hebrew, but one tries to read a text/plain message in English. Since I > have (or just want...) to communicate with people who are not using > Mutt, and even like using web-mail clients, I decided to come up with > a solution. > > The solution I came with is a 'filter' that stands between Mutt and > the actual mail-sending utility (e.g. sendmail or msmtp). Mutt is > configured to pass the mail to this new tool instead to sendmail. The > tool - plainMail2HTML - parses the mail, generates a HTML part and > attaches it to the message, and then passes it over to sendmail. So if > the original mail has only text so its type is text/plain, it would > become a multipart/alternative message that contains text/plain and > text/html parts. This is done automatically for every mail, or you can > of course configure the behavior using hooks and macros. > > Another feature of plainMail2HTML is that it contains a parser that > parse reStructuredText (a text markup language) so I can control the > formatting of the mail. This parse is designed to be modular, so it > can be replaced with a different parser (although this was not yet > tried). > > plainMail2HTML is written in Python and uses docutils. It also uses a > variation of docutils rst-to-html utility that reads the text and > insert direction tags into the html (dir="RTL", dir="LTR") so the > resulting HTML is BIDI-aware. > > I just created a project for it on Sourceforge. I've been using it for > many months now and it's working pretty nice. It can also handle > forwarded messages and messages with attachments. It still lacks some > features and better error handling. > > The project is https://sourceforge.net/projects/plain2html/ > > There is additional information in the README file on the project > page, and you can download a beta version. The project yet lacks > decent documentation, but I'd be glad to answer any question about it. > > I hope some of you would find this interesting and perhaps even > useful. I'd be happy to hear any comments and suggestions. Developers > are welcome to join the project, too. > > Best, > > Amit > > -- > > :: > > Amit עמית > Ramon רמון
On a related topic, is there any way to get mutt to display RTL for certain characters? The Hebrew characters in your signature, for instance, are displayed LTR in my mutt, so they read backwards. -- Sterling (Chip) Camden | sterl...@camdensoftware.com | 2048D/3A978E4F http://camdensoftware.com | http://chipstips.com | http://chipsquips.com
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