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
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>