Re: Emacs as word processor

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,
>     address@hidden
> Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 11:35:12 +0900
> 
> For example, normally text properties are carried with the text if
> cut/copied.  That sucks for paragraph-level things.  If it's a
> document-level style, there's no need, it will be in effect at the
> target point, too.  If you're moving the text between documents, it's
> reasonably likely you *don't* want that stuff at the target point.
> N.B. This is the behavior of Excel that I hate most: it defaults to
> carrying cell formatting with the contents when pasting -- I almost
> *never* want that, and there's no way I know of to change the default
> paste style in any *Office spreadsheet.
> 
> Of course you can write code that discards those properties, but
> really, that's not what you want.  Some properties should never be
> copied (and for the exceptions, it's not that burdensome to query and
> reapply those properties).  That should be an attribute of the
> property itself, not the code that copies or moves text.

We have yank-excluded-properties for that.

> If you want a certain amount of WYSIWYG in a form that is very
> compatible with traditional Emacs philosophy, I think that's very
> do-able, with a reasonable amount of effort (none of which am I going
> to supply, though, not even to port it to XEmacs -- I really don't
> think it's worth it, better to teach people to AUCTeX and preview).
> 
> But if you (FVO of you = "any of the folks who have participated in
> this thread") want something that will attract new users to the Emacs
> fold, that is going to be a *ton* of drudgery.  On the level of
> "friends don't let friends drink and drive."  Trying to "make Emacs a
> plausible alternative to *Office for non-Emacs users" is the kind of
> self-destructive behavior I hope my friends will avoid.  :-)

I assume we want the former.  At least that's what I had in mind.  The
latter is not a practical goal, I agree.