Re: Emacs as word processor

[Christoph]

I think two different problems have been mentioned here. One is 
Wysiwyg-like features the other the possibility to be compatible with 
other formats. For me the latter problem is much more crucial. Here is 
the use case which may illustrate a typical(?) situation:

In academia (humanities branch!) the MS Word format is still the 
"standard" when you exchange editable documents. More people can handle 
odt today but not too many. So I heavily depend on the import/export 
filter LibreOffice offers for Word.
I also use Orgmode in Emacs to take notes etc. In theory, I could write 
all my documents in Orgmode and export them to odt before sending them 
off. In cases of Word users who do not have import filters for odt 
(there are still a lot of them) one would have to export into the Word 
format via LibreOffice.

However, this does not help in the following two cases that are quite 
common (in short: collaborative work on a document):

1) Someone sends me a odt- or Word-document, that I have to work on, and 
possibly send it back after having made some corrections etc.

2) I want one of the word-users (or odt-users) to edit my document and 
send it back to me after which I want to review the changes and make 
more editing.

Telling people that they should use Emacs is clearly not an option, so 
even with Emacs possessing some advanced Wysiwyg functionality (which I 
would love to have) I still would heavily depend on LibreOffice.

Chris





On 11/18/2013 07:44 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>          [ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider
>          [ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,
>          [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.
>
>      The issue is that most people want something like LibreOffice so that
>      they can do what other people do with Microsoft Word, including exchange
>      files.  That level of compatibility is a boatload of work.
>
> Yup.  But that is what is needed.
>
>      So I suspect that (a) the number of people who want this and (b) the
>      number of actual use-cases are quite small.
>
> Perhaps most current Emacs users use TeX when they want to format something.
> I use TeX to write a manual, and also when I want to send a nicely formatted
> letter; but I wish I could do the latter WYSIWYG in Emacs.
>
> But there are so many people who don't use Emacs or TeX.  They use
> WYSIWYG word processors only.  I wish we could make Emacs easy for
> them to use, so they could get the benefit of Emacs's other advantages
> while doing their word processing.