Bug 54122

No html please... :(

I agree only for things like *bold* and _underlined_ ...

I've noticed the newsreader "knode" will apply this type of formatting to plain-text messages 
when rendered on the screen (and uses /'s for /italics/).  This is, in my opinion, somewhat cool, 
doesn't clutter a message with unusual or hard-to-read tags, and doesn't rely on any given e-mail 
client's abilities to ADD these indicators.  An additional suggestion I would make would be to 
recognize lines beginning with " * " or " - " (and possibly "a)" or "1.") as begin bulleted and format 
with an auto-wrap that keeps the bullet characters visible, like this: 
 
 * bullet point that goes on for a long time 
   and wraps around to the next line 
 
This is trivial and only affects the presentation of messages to the user -- it doesn't add to the 
size of an outgoing message, and I think that is what many people will want or like. 
 
The original request, however, does have it's merits as well, but I think you will find significant 
resistance to this by the rest of us "old timers" :)  Unfortunately, when you start transmitting 
"formatting" commands, be it in HTML, rich-text, XML, or some-yet-to-be-determined format, 
you have to have "universal acceptance" of that format, and that is essentially flat-out impossible 
-- there are STILL some people who use "dumb terminals" for e-mail, and obviously these won't 
support any "fancy" formatting  [they won't even support *bold* or /italic/, but at least those are 
"human readable"] 
 
Believe it or not, as an "old timer" I am in SUPPORT of this idea, though instead of HTML I would 
suggest rich text or developing a whole-new-standard for formatting text messages -- this will 
be a feature that helps "sell" linux & kmail as an alternative to windows & outlook.  One thing that 
might help would be to add some data to the address book; namely, a flag that indicates 
"recipient is willing and able to accept formatted messages".  The default will be false, and for 
any messages where you manually insert an address, this "false" default will be used as well.  In 
other words, in order to send a message with formatting, the user would have to take a positive 
& explicit action to set this on a per-recipient basis -- presumably, said recipient is actually 
willing to receive formatted messages, so this won't be unexpected... 
 

I am glad to see so much response to my original message about text formatting in KMail. 
Your comments have given me more insights which I'd like to share with you. 
 
(According to the press / I am just a home user) KDE 3.1 was a leap forward in Enterprise 
functionality, meaning KDE should now be even more acceptabe to companies. Though that 
does not directly lead to a financial benefit to the KDE community, it will lead to more support 
for developing KDE further. 
 
However, in the Enterprise the applications rule. E-mail, though perhaps not a particularly sexy 
application/service is a much used service and therefore important. For KDE there are maybe 
two main competitors: Windows and Gnome. Windows of course has Outlook and Lotus Notes, 
both capable of sending formatted messages. Gnome has Evolution, also capable of sending 
formatted messages. So, once a user/company decides to switch from Windows to Linux - 
Gnome is attractive for it's full featured e-mail client. This is a shame because I believe the 
KDE platform as such is better than Gnome. 
 
There already is a standard for formatted e-mail. It's HTML. KMail can display HTML 
messages. More-over, many e-mail clients capable of sending HTML formatted messages also 
send a plain text representation as part of the same e-mail. Allowing the receiver to chose 
which part they will look at. The latest version of KMail (1.5) can be configured to show the 
MIME tree of received messages. This lets you have a look at this functionality. 
 
To summarize: In my opinion KMail should be able to create formatted messages in order to 
make KDE appealing to a larger community. The de-facto standard for formatting already is 
HTML. There is no need to come up with a new standard, that will just make the gap wider. 
 
I guess what is needed is an embedable component to be integrated in KMail that allows for 
text formatting. Perhaps elements of KOffice? 
 
I hope I did not step on anyone's toes with this posting. My only true interest is to provide the 
KMail developers with some feedback. I used to work for a world leader in corporate e-mail (not 
MSFT) and think I have an idea what average users are looking for in their e-mail systems. 
 
Of course I am willing to discuss further. 
 
BR, 
 
Jeroen van Rijn 

Both comments above are more literate and complete than anything I could say. 
Let me just add that my personal style relies heavily on occasional emphasized 
words to help make my point. Writing the text in an editor and then pasting it 
in or attaching it is an ugly kludge. Just one form of emphasis would help 
immensly. 

Subject: Re:  New: Could we have some basic text formatting?

On Wednesday 05 February 2003 18:01, Jeroen van Rijn wrote:
...
> I really like KMail. One improvement though would be if we could
> have some basic text formatting, like bold, italic, text color,
> perhaps even tables. This of course requires a wysiwyg html editor.

Just a note, the KMail editor widget already supports bold, italic, 
colors and even tables. It's just their is no GUI support revealing 
those features.

There's no technical problem with adding html editing support it would 
only take a few hours to get something working.

If the wish is voted up enough I'll consider lobbying for its 
acceptance and then implementing it.

Don.

Don, 
 
That is great. Count my vote for 500 ;-) I hope we'll get enough votes... 
 
/Jeroen 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 4202 ***