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Re: Emacs as word processor
From: |
Stephen J. Turnbull |
Subject: |
Re: Emacs as word processor |
Date: |
Tue, 19 Nov 2013 17:04:14 +0900 |
Richard Stallman writes:
> I use TeX to write a manual, and also when I want to send a nicely
> formatted letter; but I wish I could do the latter WYSIWYG in Emacs.
OK. But I don't think that's a very big benefit compared to the
amount of work entailed. It will be much easier (as somebody suggested
already) to produce a variant set of keybindings for LibreOffice that
more closely approximates Emacs bindings.
As for accessing the power of Emacs from your wordprocessor, most
office suites nowadays understand embedded URIs and/or MIME types, and
can bind arbitrary applications to them. I would think that in many
cases it should be possible to create "emacs:" URIs or an
"application/emacs-lisp" MIME type that could be linked to (with the
effect of using emacsclient to send code to a running Emacs process)
to get various effects. Ugly, inefficient, and clumsy, but it
probably could be made to work for a lot of use cases.
> But there are so many people who don't use Emacs or TeX. They use
> WYSIWYG word processors only. I wish we could make Emacs easy for
> them to use,
Now that is a goal we can all support, I'm sure. But please take into
consideration that for 99% of the "so many people", "easy to use" is
not just a matter of software UI (including display and layout
features). It's mostly about file format support, and that support
needs to be very high quality on input, output, and "throughput"[1]
before more than a very few people will use it "in anger". This is
going to take a huge amount of effort, a large fraction of that
available to the Emacs projects for several years (a decade or so).
Footnotes:
[1] Office suites which are capable of reading most formats received,
and outputting new files that are readable when transmitted to others,
nevertheless frequently mangle files received from others in editing.
- Re: Emacs as word processor, (continued)
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Bastien, 2013/11/21
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Bastien, 2013/11/21
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Eli Zaretskii, 2013/11/21
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Bastien, 2013/11/22
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Eli Zaretskii, 2013/11/22
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Thorsten Jolitz, 2013/11/22
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Richard Stallman, 2013/11/22
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Eli Zaretskii, 2013/11/22
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Bastien, 2013/11/22
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Rasmus, 2013/11/22
- Re: Emacs as word processor,
Stephen J. Turnbull <=
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Richard Stallman, 2013/11/19
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Christoph, 2013/11/19
- Re: Emacs as word processor, chad, 2013/11/19
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Richard Stallman, 2013/11/20
- Re: Emacs as word processor, Rasmus, 2013/11/18
Re: Emacs as word processor, Andreas Röhler, 2013/11/17
Re: Emacs as word processor, Christopher Allan Webber, 2013/11/18