Re: Emacs as word processor

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>         [ 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.
>
>     There are a lot of reactions on this thread that seem somewhat hesitant
>     about emacs adding WYSIWIG support, but I suspect it's fear that #2 will
>     corrupt the lisp machine interfaces that we already know and
>     enjoy... but I doubt that the emacs community would let that happen
>     anyway.
>
> Lisp is one of the benefits of Emacs that I wish I had when doing
> WYSIWIG word processing.  To abandon that would defeat the whole point
> of this.

It seems to me it would be easier, and produce a better result with less
effort, to add lisp to LibreOffice than WISIWIG word-processor features
to emacs.


The overview of libreoffice says:

        You can develop for LibreOffice in one of two ways, one
    recommended and one much less so. First the somewhat less
    recommended way: it is possible to use the SDK, for wihch you can
    read the API docs here http://api.libreoffice.org/. This re-uses the
    (extremely generic) APIs we provide for macro scripting in
    StarBasic.

        The best way to add a generally useful feature to LibreOffice is
    to work on the code base however. Overall this way makes it easier
    to compile and build your code, it avoids any arbitrary limitations
    of our scripting APIs, and in general is far more simple and
    intuitive - if you are a reasonably able C++ programmer.

The C++ code uses quite a number of templates, so I guess it won't be
easy to generate automatically a FFI to drive the C++ program from lisp.

But it seems to me that it would be easy enough to target the
LibreOffice API, so that you can write LibreOffice scripts in lisp.

Since this API is apparently written in Java, we could consider using
ABCL to do this.  (Or if you insist on it, some scheme implementation on
Java or JVM).



Otherwise, the main part of WISIWIG, is to represent on screen something
that is isomorph to what's represented elsewhere.  That is, on paper
and, nowadays, on web pages.  So the first thing would be to implement a
model and views of paper pages (page size and layout, margins,
resolutions, fonts, paint, colors), and for web page rendering, we'd
need a HTML rendering engine (probably including Javascript).  Already
only that seems like a bigger job than integrating lisp with the API of
LibreOffice…


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com/