Re: Emacs as word processor

[Jambunathan K]

I am surprised that the discussion has more or less focussed on the
"character styles" part but has more or less ignored lists and tables.

John Yates <address@hidden> writes:

> structural elements

Please take a look at

    http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html
    http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-export-reference.html

The parser is in org-element.el.  The "affiliated keywords" are a
primitive form of specifying up some attributes - HTML or LaTeX specific
- of an element (say a paragraph).

There are plenty of examples of real life Org files in
    
   http://orgmode.org/w/?p=worg.git;a=tree

It is instructive to run

   M-x pp-eval-expression (org-element-parse-buffer)

in an Org file to see how the text file is translated in to Lisp.

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Ideally if a wordprocessing-mode buffer is DE-RICHIFIED one should could
end up with an Org-mode buffer.  This would be a good goal to have.

i.e., For all practical purposes, the new mode should be a "RICHIFIED"
Org-mode buffer.  The richness would come from attaching
display/rendering properties like margin, padding etc to an Org-mode
buffer.

Before finalizing the internal representation of document please pay
close attention to Org's parser infrastructure and representation and
see how it could be AUGMENTED to provide richification.

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Real-life documents are a COLLECTION of files.  So, the default format
will be a zip file the usual bells and whistles like manifest etc.

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Table editing:

We would need the ability to edit multiple paragraphs within a table
cell.  This means M-q working as expected, table rows expanding down
below if required etc. all with good responsiveness from display.

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Markup format:

As for markup format, I see that there is not much demand for docbook.
(The org-docbook.el exporter which was part of earlier releases has been
removed and not even a single soul - this includes the original author -
has cried foul.)

The primary contenders are LaTeX, HTML (may be Epub) or OpenDocument
format.

There could be a native format which can be "read" in as a sexp.  (Think
stringified buffer with text properties)

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Scripting?

Typically a document has a scripting language - HTML has Javascript,
OpenOffice files have the Basic Macros.  Emacs lisp can be considered as
a "scripting language" for Emacs generated files.   I am not sure what
this comment amounts to, just recording it ...

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In-Document Change tracking

There is a lot of demand for in-document markup that highlights changes.
This permits colloboration.  Even if colloboration between two users
editing the SAME document but with different TOOLS (say Emacs,
LibreOffice, MS Word) could be an ideal to aspire to, ability to do
change tracking between two Emacs users should still be permissible.

This IMO is not a desirable but an essential feature of the proposed
wordprocessing mode.