Re: Printing of HTML emails still impossible.

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

On 06/24/2003, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
> Am 24.06.03 16:43 schrieb(en) Peter Bloomfield:
>> Agreed!  Perhaps we should revert to GtkHtml for handling html 
>> messages--it has a printing section in its api, and GtkHtml2 (which 
>> has been used in all Balsa-2.0.x versions) seems to have none.  Does 
>> anyone have any insights?
> 
> IIRC, gtkhtml has been *very* unstable, killing balsa on a regular 
> basis through some types of adv/spam mails. This has been resolved 
> only with Gnome 2.2, so **please** don't move backwards!!

I've seen many problems with the gtkhtml2 libs that Balsa-2.0.x has 
linked with--I haven't heard of any similar problems with gtkhtml(1).

> I must admit that I doubt if html printing is (a) necessary and (b) 
> easy to do.

(a) Necessity is, as you note, a personal issue!
(b) If it's not easy to do, yours truly won't take it on--I go after 
low-hanging fruit!  The api includes:

void gtk_html_print(GtkHTML *html,
                     GnomePrintContext *print_context);

which looks encouraging.

> My *personal* pov is that html printing is not necessary, as 99% of 
> the html-only mails I get are spam. Some people send multipart/
> alternative with a html and a plain part containing the same 
> information (read: text, not font/color/...). I know that there have 
> been extensive discussions about html mails here, and I don't want to 
> start that again. *I* think, if it should be implemented, it has a 
> *very* low priority.
> 
> The second point is that afaict html rendering/printing may be 
> difficult to implement in the current framework. The only quick and 
> easy solution would be an api which returns pixmaps or ps structures 
> for a given area (remember that the html part may start somewhere on 
> balsa's printout, due to headers/other parts). Implementing that 
> within balsa itself would be a *huge* task and incomplete almost 
> forever; even mozilla can not print everything correctly...
> 
> Just my ¤ 0.01...

All good points--I'm *very* grateful for the option to prefer plain 
text over html--but it nags at me whenever I try to print a mail from 
the last 1%, and just get the icon (well, a blank space, actually).

We'll subject any change to exhaustive and strenuous testing, as 
always... ;-)

Peter