Forum Issues, News, and Announcements Forum feature request: Allow inline images in situ with comment text
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Forum Issues, News, and Announcements Forum feature request: Allow inline images in situ with comment text
Use-cases:
Justification: When I'm wanting to describe a problem I'm having as a user, or a developer, I want to see text then pictures, then text again, all inlined together into the view of a post. Having to click on a link into a new browser tab or window, or single click it and have to click the back button, is wasted motion I would like to optimize away.
Provenance for #1: Stackexchange sites allow you to copy a screenshot to the clipboard, and typing CTRL+v will paste it into the forum. I speculate that they have a backend that uploads it into some imgur site and then converts it into a specially formatted link that, when viewed by the user, shows up inlined with the surrounding text.
Provenance for #2: Only as a last resort of #1 is egregiously expensive to implement: phpBB-based sites have a bbcode tag. e.g.,:
[img]https://i.imgur.com/clckpcN.png[/img]
would represent a link that, when the comment is rendered in the browser, would look like this: https://i.imgur.com/clckpcN.png (same link there).
Notice how quickly I can read that post. No clicking around and wasting the users time when there is a more user-friendly (lower cost and efficient for them) alternative.
We already have inline images in the forums. You can drag and drop, link to, use the button etc. Web browsers have no access to the clipboard so that kind of feature would need extra development.
"Web browsers have no access to the clipboard so that kind of feature would need extra development." I disagree. Browsers do have access both to text and to image clipboards, as StackExchange sites use it all the time. In fact, I double checked it in stackexchange just now: I used CTRL+ALT-Pscr on my keyboard in Gnome running under Ubuntu 19.10 running latest Firefox, and pasted it directly into an answer field, and saw a reduce replica image of the section of the screen I posted: https://i.imgur.com/6RpK4co.png
"use thr button" what is the "thr" button? I do not see any such button. If inlined images do already exist then it should be pretty obvious that there is a button or some guidance on how to use it.
Then this selection
With these two images though I just dragged and dropped them from my file browser.
Maybe if the tooltip for the 3rd button would say "inline" or maybe "full size" (or maybe both) it would help? To be honest, I don't know what "embed in html" means, and probably most people don't know. It took a few months before someone told me what it does.
I'm not seeing that button you mented above with "<-- this button" (oh NOW I see it ... it is at the bottom of the text, not where all of the other buttons are), What I am seeing on my browser is this:
https://i.imgur.com/IIcGl7Y.png
"embed in html" is probably too low level for non-programmers for sure. Ok, what I meant is that I want to somehow to be able to insert in an image so that it shows up in with the text, so that when someone views that comment, they won't be burdened with having to click on a link to view the image, but can just see it. That does not obviate the addition of links to images on other sites such as imgur.com as I did above.
I don't know about dragging/dropping images from file browsers; not sure if that works on all operating systems even if it works for your operating system and browser (e.g., probably works for Microsoft Windows on Firefox although I've not tested it). My main goal is to be able to take a screenshot of some part of the screen, move my mouse cursor into the text, and type some combination of keys such as holding down CTRL and typing "v" to paste (just like copy/pasting text).
I believe stackexchange-based sites have implemented it, and if they did, then I conjecture they worked out the technical details on how to do it in a cross-platform and cross-browser way.
Ok now that I have found the button, it does not do what I want. I have to have the extra burden of copying a image into some other tool, save it to a .png file, click on the paperclip button below the text entry box, navigate to the directory where it is stored (or actually copy/paste the fully qualified path to the file) and paste it in, then click the UPLOAD FILE button. And then I receive the result.
Compare that with what I mentioned above as it reduces wasted motion for the user for those cases where I need to quickly and efficiently copy some section off of the window, and directly paste it in. No fiddling around with saving opening and navigating file dialog boxes. But that certainly should not be done as a replacement for the paper clip button, which means "attaching" something, not "inserting something". And the choice of a paperclip is actually correct for that operation; I'm nitpicking on the faster way of just inserting a screenshot of some section of a window or the entire window itself.
This is possible to do. I've just had a play with a few methods to see how easy it is. It's quite fiddly, so I'm going to leave this as an exercise for a new contributor who wants to paly with the javascript (there's different things depending on firefox/chrome while IE and Sarafi are not posible.
I don't know any forum software that can do this.
Of course you do. I don't know any forum software that will accept an image that has been simply copied.
Of course, I have no idea what Martin might have in mind. But I don't see this as a feature which this forum needs. To me, it has workable enough attachment features.
https://inkscape.org/forums/forum-news/forum-feature-request-allow-inline-images-in-situ-with-comment-text/#c9872
indicates that stackexchange allows for this so that is why I reason that some "forum software" (if you can call stackexchange that, which is of course debatable) has this capability.
But if you reason that it is not needed then I'll drop the matter.
Well, that's just my opinion. And mine is certainly not the last word. You or anyone are welcome to make the feature request.
Personally, I don't see saving copied contents as an image, as a lot of trouble. To me, that's just what you do. Most people have some kind of screenshot tool that does it more or less automatically. Until you suggested this, I didn't even think it would be possible. It seems like it sort of makes the message editor into a graphic program.
But anyway, that's just my opinion.
Understood.
For this:
Yes that is true, but my issue is what happens next, after the user has copied an image into the clipboard: This forum, as currently coded, places a burden on the user to do something cumbersome after they have taken the screenshot that is in the clipboard. What I wanted is a paste button that frees them from those cumbersome steps to paste the image clipboard into the posting they are currently working on.
I'm going to have to accept that this request won't be honored.
That should be the default for all open source feature requests.
Open source honour isn't like a customer/seller relationship. Our honour comes in being ready to accept the contributions you have made with the most amount of generosity we can spare. The more of the work you're able to do, the better able the rest of the community is to respond to it. For example if you were to recruit one of the many javascript developers to fix this specific issue, I would honour the contribution and spend my time testing and deploying it.
Oh yes, I understand what you're asking. I just don't see it as cumbersome. To me, that's just how it's done. It just takes a minute. And if your program is already open, even less time than that.
But as I said before, just because I don't personally see a need for it, does not mean it should not be done. That's just my opinion.
As Martin alluded, what it really comes down to, is a developer with the right skills, with the time and motivation to do it. And the more you can be personally involved, the more likely it will happen. The only thing we can say for sure, is if it's not documented in a report, it won't happen.
I totally understand. Thank you both.