Formatting HTML content for colour-terminals (was: Rendering HTML as Markdown in mutt)

[martin f krafft]

Regarding the following, written by "Akkana Peck" on 2019-10-31 at 18:55 Uhr -0600:
>That sounds like it's all on the viewing side? I can't speak for 
>Derek, but in addition to viewing HTML messages, I (and others who 
>have added to this thread) would like a way to reply without losing 
>the formatting.

You mean "losing the formatting" of the message sent to you?

This is going to get really hard very quickly. Either you convert 
the HTML into Markdown, blockquote it, and then hope that the 
Markdown to HTML conversion does it justice (probably your best bet 
to be honest), or you wrap the original HTML into a blockquote and 
include it verbatim. That is certainly the domain of an HTML editor, 
I'd say, and it'll get ugly really fast.

>The viewing side isn't so hot either. Most terminal programs these 
>days can display colors, italics, bold, underline and strikethrough 
>(looks like urxvt doesn't do strikethrough and xterm doesn't do 
>underline, but those might not be too hard to patch in). So why do 
>most HTML->text conversion programs ignore styles and colors in 
>--dump mode? Is there one that shows styles/colors?

This really is only a matter of outputting the right control 
characters. I don't know of any that can do it, but I cannot imagine 
it being hard work on top of Python `html2text`, i.e. I'd let that 
do the conversion to Markdown, and then see if I can replace the 
Markdown formatting with terminal control characters.

Helpful link: 
https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Terminal_control/Coloured_text

>Sure, it's easy enough to bind a key to bring up a browser window 
>showing the message. But then I have an extra GUI window that isn't 
>part of mutt, and it breaks that nice fast keyboard-driven workflow 
>that's a big part of why I use mutt in the first place. It would be 
>so nice to have it all right there in the pager.

Step 1 to check: can mutt's pager handle terminal control characters 
for formatting, or is ncurses going to get in the way?

I just tried to make my HTML dumper output red text like so:

   tput setaf 1    #red
   echo "Red"
   tput sgr0

but that didn't get the desired result. So I am thinking that 
ncurses actually gets in the way, and I am way outside my depth with 
that, but irssi can do it, and so it should also be possible with 
mutt.

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