[Kde-pim] HTML support in Kmail

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sunday 08 November 2009, nicco ts wrote:
> >The biggest problem with respect to HTML support in KMail is the
> > lack of a powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor written in Qt that we could
> > use in KMail.
>
> It could sound as insane idea but "the end justifies the means". So
> what about to use koffice to compose messages instead of Qt HTML
> wysiwyg? Yes I hear people swearing if they will see kmail dependency
> with koffice ;-) and koffice is not core KDE4 application I suppose,
> but it would be so nice. Just same as Outlook uses Word to compose
> messages, so you can't have big Outlook without full Office.

Did you ever have a look at an HTML message created by Word? 90 % of the 
HTML is totally superfluous. This is such a waste of bandwidth.

Obviously, we wouldn't make this mistake. Still there are two problems:
a) Does KWord sport a decent HTML import (for embedding the original 
message) and export (for creating the new message)? (I simply don't 
know.)
b) KWord allows much more than HTML supports. Also the message will 
almost never look exactly as it looked like in KWord.


> But do you really need some HTML editor? Because now, we can compose
> HTML messages without any problem, so there definitely is some HTML
> editor to compose HTML message in current Kmail.

As I said we are using a rich text editor that comes with Qt 
(QTextEdit). This editor has only very rudimentary support for HTML. It 
doesn't even support embedding images. KMail does now support this, but 
we had to write the corresponding code ourselves.


> What I just want is to copy and paste HTML source code of message
> history to the end of message which I'm composing in existing HTML
> editor. Maybe in same way as we paste signatures or HTML signatures
> into new message. You open new message composer and HTML signature is
> already there. So what about to do the same with message - take some
> existing HTML message from inbox and paste it as it is below
> signature.

Thomas suggested to put the original HTML code of the message you reply 
to verbatim in a kind of attachment.


> I don't want to edit there anything, just to paste it as it is. It
> sounds so simple. All formating is already done, you just need to
> take it and paste it into editor which already is HTML capable. It
> really sounds as easy fix. What do you think?

Unfortunately, it's not that easy. QTextEdit is not able to display the 
HTML correctly. This would surely confuse most users and we'd receive 
loads of bug reports for this.

The most simple solution would be to allow the user to write HTML with 
an external editor. KMail does already support the usage of an external 
editor for the message text. But this text is interpreted as plain text 
so that, at the moment, an external editor cannot be used for composing 
an HTML message.


Regards,
Ingo
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