Arch Linux

petelewis

Package Maintainer (PM)

From: Birmingham, UK

Registered: 2008-08-14

Posts: 128

Website

Getting w3m to dump with formatting.

Hi,

For ages I've been using w3m to dump HTML email into Mutt's pager, as I'm sure many of us do.

But lately the evil HTML email senders are relying on formatting (boldface, colours, etc.) more and more. I realised that w3m does deal with this, if used in interactive mode. E.g. some <strong> text gets converted to bolded white in my terminal (konsole). But, if I use w3m with -dump, the resulting text doesn't contain any of this, it's just text. This is easily verifiable without mutt, just open the same HTML doc with "w3m" and "w3m -dump" and compare.

I suppose what I'm asking is: how can I get w3m to generate the appropriate escape codes when in dump mode?

Thanks,

Pete.

PS. I'm also open to alternatives, I'm not wedded to w3m, it just seems to work pretty well otherwise.

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"Cared thou not, thou would have abstained." - Xyne

skanky

Member

From: WAIS

Registered: 2009-10-23

Posts: 1,847

Re: Getting w3m to dump with formatting.

I use elinks but it's not much better (there may be some config that can be done, not tried yet). However, you can set an external application to be the message pager in mutt. Obviously you won't want to do this all the time, so you could possible set up a macro that changes the pager, opens the message (or part) and then changes it back?

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"...one cannot be angry when one looks at a penguin."  - John Ruskin
"Life in general is a bit shit, and so too is the internet. And that's all there is." - scepticisle

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Getting w3m to dump with formatting.

You can use tput, but you would have to parse the html and change

<u>test</u> test
<strong>test</strong> test

to

echo $(tput bold)test$(tput sgr0) test
echo $(tput smul)test$(tput sgr0) test