Re: Emacs as word processor

[Juan M . Gonzalez]

Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org> writes:
> 25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word
> processing.  That is why we added text properties and variable width
> fonts.  However, more features are still needed to achieve this.
> 
> Could people please start working on the features that are needed?


The following free software, co-funded by the European Union, seems similar
to what is suggested in this thread:

Hallo.js - Editing Markdown in WYSIWYG
http://hallojs.org/demo/markdown/

On this simple but interesting demo, we can click or select anything in the
main text, and a toolbar for bold, headings, etc. appears to edit and format
the text directly (WYSIWYG), instead of the Markdown source, which is
automatically updated at the same time.

An Emacs' optional WYSIWYG frontend or minor mode could offer multiple
markups as configurable or automatic backends, according to the major mode
in use; e.g. markups like Emacs Org, LaTeX, HTML, Markdown, etc.

There are some first steps in Emacs in this direction, already mentioned in
this thread, like the old minor mode enriched-mode (with text/enriched as
underlying markup), etc.:

http://www.emacswiki.org/EnrichedMode
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Enriched-Mode.html
http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-92/emacs/lisp/facemenu.el
http://www.emacswiki.org/FaceMenuPlus
http://www.emacswiki.org/HighlightLibrary

(See also the Emacs menu Edit > Text Properties).