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Emacs as a word processor


From: Gregory Heytings
Subject: Emacs as a word processor
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2020 18:22:00 +0000
User-agent: Alpine 2.22 (NEB 394 2020-01-19)


Daniel Martín:
I've been trying for more than 10 years to urge people to work toward giving Emacs the document capabilities of a word processor, but I have not convinced people to do this work.

What do you mean by this? I'm probably biased, but I don't see what important "capability of a word processor" is lacking in Emacs.

Something that works like LibreOffice, where you can write a document, select parts of it, mark them in bold, justify them, etc. All of that while you see the results in a WYSIWYG fashion. The closest thing there is now is enriched-mode, but that mode does not offer the same level of features as LibreOffice.

There is more context about this potential new feature in /etc/TODO under the section "Emacs as a word processor".


Eli Zaretskii:
The WYSIWYG part is missing. See the etc/TODO entry about that for a pointer to a discussion about this.


Yes, I know about that entry in etc/TODO, in which RMS expresses the same wish. I've read the discussion again, and it's still not clear at all to me what features are really missing. I'm not sure characterizing them under the acronym WYSIWYG or referring to LibreOffice is more precise.

My impression (but I could very well be wrong) is that what RMS would like to have is not a truly WYSIWYG word processor that would compete with LibreOffice, but something simpler. And that a detailed list of features would make that TODO entry more concrete. Hence my question.

An attempt to list features a user could expect from a word processor :

[ ] import / export Microsoft Word files
[ ] import / export Open Document Format (.odt) files
[ ] import / export RTF files
[ ] export to a PDF file
[ ] select a font and its size
[ ] apply a bold / italic / underline / strikethrough effect
[ ] superscripts / subscripts
[ ] apply a left / center / right / justified effect
[ ] change the font color and the background color
[ ] create a list
[ ] insert and change a table
[ ] insert a picture
[ ] define / use / modify styles
[ ] print preview / print
[ ] use footnotes
[ ] multiple columns
[ ] change page headers and footers

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