Re: Emacs as word processor / Text Properties

[T.V. Raman]

All that said, *every* known WYSWYG word-processor also degrades
to using a dump of its internal data structures as its file
format.  Emacs has stayed free of this mess, and documents I
wrote as a grad student in 1990 are still fully usable and live
in 2013 -- rather than having turned into ossified bags of bits.
This is a feature, not a bug.
-- 

-- 


On 11/26/13, Pascal J. Bourguignon <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> To me, text properties, and faces as text properties, have always felt
> like a kludge.
>
>
> At best, they may be used to transport information from the modes to the
> display engine, like the faces, but otherwise (apart for quick & dirty
> jobs), it seems to me that in general modes sh/would have more pertinent
> lisp data structures, and use them to set the face in the buffer to
> represent that data structure.
>
> I know that emacs puts a lot of importance on the buffer data structure
> (a sequence of characters with attributes), which is all right for a
> text editor, but when you write _applications_ in emacs, it is much too
> limiting.  And a word processor is an application, with more complex
> data structures than a sequence of characters.
>
> So indeed, when copy-pasting text in a word processor, depending on the
> range of text, ie. depending on the structure that is copied: simple
> sequence of characters, punctuated sequence of words, paragraphs,
> sections, chapters or whole document, you may or may not want to bring
> along the styles.  But most often you will want to bring along the
> structure.
>
>
> eg. probably, if your selection crosses element boundaries, for the
> characters
> that have only one "tag", you won't want to bring the style and faces,
> but for characters that are inside elements copied in whole, you will
> want to apply the style for those elements in the target place.  In both
> cases, the faces as copied text properties  are useless.
>
> --
> __Pascal Bourguignon__
> http://www.informatimago.com/
>
>
>