Re: gnus: link annoyance

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Joseph Vidal-Rosset <joseph.vidal.rosset@gmail.com> writes:

> Org uses Gnus, is it possible of making uses of Org via Gnus?  [...]
> Is it already possible to do that with Org and Gnus, or not?  If it is
> not possible at the moment, would it be possible?

Gnus and Org are both open source and very capable systems, both in
themselves and when it comes to extensibility.  The main problem is
acquiring enough familiarity with their internals to find out the
correct, short, compact way of doing about anything one wants. :-)

> I mean that it would be great to write a letter with for example the
> letter class in a file letter.org .  After that you can export your
> letter.org to a letter.html as well as to letter.pdf via letter.tex,
> and with Gnus, thanks to the link system, you can send your nice
> letter.html to your colleague with letter.pdf as attachment.

Many years ago, the message composition has been fairly decoupled from
Gnus and brought back into Emacs for other mailers to use.  So, I guess
you are seeking some machinery between Org and Message, more than
between Org and Gnus.

I'm far from being sure, but if I wanted to use Org as a mean to write
HTML or PDF as message attachments, I would think it could be done with
a very moderate amount of Emacs Lisp customization.  Unless mistaken,
the Org editor to HTML might yield its output in a temporary Emacs
buffer, (for PDF, maybe not) and I would be fairly surprised if message
composition does not have facilities to receive attachments from
buffers.  And even if one would have to go through an external file, the
extra overhead might be negligible in practice.  Putting all the pieces
together might require some work, but maybe not that much.

François