Re: Saving markup formats

[Nic James Ferrier]

"Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <address@hidden> writes:

>> I have a clue... but I'm not really interested
>> in editing them as XML files.
>
> I guess that would be the price (to edit them as XML). I understand it 
> as if you want some intermediate view. I think that is reasonable only 
> on an abstract level (like navigating etc).

I want emacs to be my word processor. I don't care about wysiwyg. I
just want to be able to edit the files. I don't think this is
unreasonable since most of the information is in well-marked up
documents.

Let me tell you about how I make my CV right now:

- I edit the CV in org mode
- I transform org mode to XOXO/XHTML using elisp
- I run an XSLT transform to turn the XOXO into XHTML
- I run an XSLT transform to turn the XHTML into an OpenDoc
  content.xml file
- I zip the new content.xml file up with a standard template for the
  other files that come with an OpenDoc file

So essentially I'm doing there what I'm talking about here. Just in a
long winded way and using more than just elisp.

org-mode is providing stylistic markup which has syntax and can be
serialized to some syntax not it's own (XOXO in this case).


Instead of this I don't see why I shouldn't be able to write a mode
that stores text in properties as a set of named styles (in the case
of OpenDoc these would be derived from the Relax-NG Schema and from a
template of common styles); eg in elisp manual text property syntax:


#("Nic Ferrier - CV" 0 16 (element h2))
#("Nic is a hacker with some crazy ideas" 0 37 (element para style p1))


this would be quite simple to display nicely in Emacs (in a variety of
ways) and it has all the syntactic information necessary to serialize
back to an OpenDoc document.

I just need some way of getting the XML into the text properties. And
xmltok might help with that.

-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk   

PS in *principle* I don't see any reason why word is any different than
OpenDoc. It's just XML at the end of the day. Wouldn't it be a coup to
be able to edit Word files in Emacs?