Message about using an external tool: w3m, elinks, links, html2tex

1

Dear all,
I’ve install a RT v5.0.1 .
Each morning, a cron execute the rt-fulltext-indexer script, to re-generate the index file.
I note that for this new version of RT, this command generate a wardning message:

[200062] [Fri Oct 15 11:32:04 2021] [warning]: Running with the internal HTML converter can result in performance issues with some HTML. Install one of the following utilities with your package manager to improve performance with an external tool: w3m, elinks, links, html2text, lynx ( /opt/rt5/sbin/ …/lib/RT/Interface/Email.pm:1518)

SO, i’ve to install on my RT server one of this packages to help RT? What i can’t understand is that this package are web browser, if i’m not wrong…

Hope that someone could explain me.

Regards

2

You can run into issues where very large HTML emails timeout due to the Perl HTML render not being very fast. I believe these packages are just better so its suggested to install one

3

Anyone have suggestion for this so please reply. Thanks in advance.

4

The fix is to install one of the packages listed

5

For what it is worth, I would recommend testing several of them; I’ve had remarkably poor and inconsistent results from all of them, and just ended up having to choose the least-bad from the lot. You’ll want to test it with the sort of input that you are most likely to receive…sadly, that’s not always within your control!

6

I’ve found w3m produces the best quality, most consistent appearing HTML to text conversion. What tool did you find works best?

7

Sadly, I can’t get w3m to work on the bizarre Linux variant I’m forced to use (Oracle Linux, based on a split of RHEL) - even compiling it manually was more of a headache. No package for it either, which isn’t a surprise given the age.

At the moment, I’m actually using the Perl default, but seem to have tried links and lynx and html2text, but everything had its quirks with the input I’m having to receive.

9

HTMLFormatExternal module is installed, use w3m,elinks, links, html2text, or lynx to format HTML to text. Thisaddresses problems with the pure-Perl HTML-to-text converted whichresulted in blank outgoing emails.
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