How can I include attachments (images or plain text) so that they appear in the middle of the message rather than at the end (‘inline attachments’)?
A colleague of mine with the LilyPond team can insert attachments (like plain text or images) so that they are included in the middle of the text rather than at the end. He does this using Gnus, an extension for Emacs: http://www.gnus.org/ And, to quote him:
‘I should think that a dedicated industry standard standalone mail program should easily offer the same amount of functionality as some add-on interpreted-language extension for a general-purpose text editor.’
I wouldn’t choose such bold wording, but is there such a function in Thunderbird? If not, I’d really like to have one – it’s a very useful feature IMO.
Thank you!
Chosen solution
An attachment is a separate file that accompanies your email message. Properly speaking, it is not "inside" your message, but appended to it. It so happens with many types of attachment that Thunderbird, on receiving one, will show it after the message body. But many email clients won't do this. So you are, as is often the case in email, rather at the mercy of the foibles of your correspondents' choice of email program.
If you want material to appear inline, you will need to paste it into the message body.
Since there is no functionality in plain text email to insert material from external sources, your colleague must be using some form of enhanced text markup, or a tool for assembling multiple sources into one document. "Enhanced" usually means HTML, particularly if images are involved. Plain text has no support for images, except as attached files.
Use HTML in Thunderbird and you can freely insert images. For text, you'll have to copy-and-paste. Possibly your colleague has a macro that simply opens a text file and reads the text from it into the email message he is composing. And if so, the imported text is no longer an "attachment". Looking at this: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/index.html#Top I think I'm not too far from the mark.
How does it cope with formatted text? Can it open .doc, .docx, .pdf, .odt and so forth? How does it deal with formatting markup in the opened file? How many email users have a need to insert from plain text files? Few even know what one is.
That gnus link looks awfully geeky, and I'm speaking as someone with a passing acquaintance with git, vi, grep, redmine and similar tools. Meaningless to most of us. Emacs would be unfathomable to the majority of email users.
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Chosen Solution
An attachment is a separate file that accompanies your email message. Properly speaking, it is not "inside" your message, but appended to it. It so happens with many types of attachment that Thunderbird, on receiving one, will show it after the message body. But many email clients won't do this. So you are, as is often the case in email, rather at the mercy of the foibles of your correspondents' choice of email program.
If you want material to appear inline, you will need to paste it into the message body.
Since there is no functionality in plain text email to insert material from external sources, your colleague must be using some form of enhanced text markup, or a tool for assembling multiple sources into one document. "Enhanced" usually means HTML, particularly if images are involved. Plain text has no support for images, except as attached files.
Use HTML in Thunderbird and you can freely insert images. For text, you'll have to copy-and-paste. Possibly your colleague has a macro that simply opens a text file and reads the text from it into the email message he is composing. And if so, the imported text is no longer an "attachment". Looking at this: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/index.html#Top I think I'm not too far from the mark.
How does it cope with formatted text? Can it open .doc, .docx, .pdf, .odt and so forth? How does it deal with formatting markup in the opened file? How many email users have a need to insert from plain text files? Few even know what one is.
That gnus link looks awfully geeky, and I'm speaking as someone with a passing acquaintance with git, vi, grep, redmine and similar tools. Meaningless to most of us. Emacs would be unfathomable to the majority of email users.
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