Re: using templates to write articles (email)

[lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de>]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> writes:
>
>> So far, I´ve created templates as plain text files, and when writing an
>> email from the template, I delete everything in the composing buffer and
>> do an insert-file to read the template into the buffer. This works fine,
>> and perhaps there´s some support for templates already built in, which
>> would make using templates more convenient?
>
>
> (defun my-mail-merge (names buffer subject from marker)
>   "This is a bit of a mess, but it's something like a mail merge.
>
> Variable containing names should be a list of two-element lists,
> in the format (\"Name\" \"email address\")."
>   (interactive "XVariable containing names: \nbBuffer to slurp: \nsSubject: \nsFrom: \nsMarker: ")
>   (dolist (n names)
>     (compose-mail (nth 1 n)		; to address
> 		  subject
> 		  `(("From" . ,from))  ; all other headers
> 		  nil nil nil nil)	; don't remember
>     (insert-buffer-substring (get-buffer buffer))
>     (message-goto-body)
>     (perform-replace marker (nth 0 n) nil nil nil) ; insert name
>     (message-send-and-exit)))
>
> Hope that provides food for thought,

It does, thanks :) If I understand your code correctly --- and I don´t
know how to program in elisp (yet) --- your function would load text
from some buffer into the composing buffer and replace placeholders with
names and emailaddresses supplied as parameters to the function. That
way, you could mail an otherwise identical text to a number of
recipients with automatically customized salutations.

What I´m looking for is a little simpler in that I don´t need to use
placeholders. It´s ok to edit each message manually. I think it might be
possible, as Didier Verna suggested in his reply, to use posting styles
and to use a function that just replaces the whole default content of
the composing buffer with my template.

I´ll try to figure out how to get it set up that way; it´ll be a nice
excercise. I´ll let you guys know what I come up with --- or ask some
more questions about how to do it when I get stuck :)