Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Arthur Miller]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
>> Cc: Gregory Heytings <ghe@sdf.org>,  rms@gnu.org,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2020 18:52:48 +0100
>> 
>> Personally I think Emacs is half-wysiwyg, or more then half by now. I
>> think there are almost all tools needed to implement a word processor a
>> lá Word already in Emacs; I think there is just some minor details
>> needed; like renderer that can draw efficient representation of a page
>> below a buffer text (a rectangle) and to tie the text editing stuff to
>> pixels rather then columns. I was experimenting with modelling a page in
>> Emacs in context of some other discussion, and that was what I found a
>> tad bit awkward.
>> 
>> But I am bad at Elisp, and what Emacs already has, so hopefully Eli will
>> step in and say: "we already have this."
>
> I think most of the necessary infrastructure exists indeed.  However,
> building a WYSIWYG word processor on top of that is not a trivial job,
> although probably not rocket science, either.  I'd start from
> enriched.el and took it from there.
Yeah, I know; that is why I said it is not hard, but labourous. Yes I
was thinking of enriched mode, and some parts of org.

Rougier has made a very nice demo with svg-toolbars; those things could
be put together to create a kind of wysyvig where people can mark text,
set it to italics/bold etc. Justifying text could be done too. But
without being able to render a page representation in a buffer, it
wouldn't be feel of a word processor.

Maybe the feel is not that important; maybe it is enough to just render two
lines where page width and page height are, so user can adjust text
manually when he/she sees it go out of the "page range".

Printed preview could be achieved with svg renderer just rendering
buffer into an image of given page width and height. Would need to take
printer characteristics into account, but some basic print preview, not
pixel perfect could be achieved relatively easy.