emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Towards a WYSIWYG word processing (was: What improvements would be truly


From: John Yates
Subject: Towards a WYSIWYG word processing (was: What improvements would be truly useful?)
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2018 16:45:56 -0500

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 3:51 PM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
> Once we can do proper formatting of paragraphs
> with variable-width text, with a few kinds of alignment, and we can
> save these in files, we will be able to use it for writing letters and
> handouts, instead of LibreOffice.

I agree that filling with proportional fonts is a crucial piece of
building a WYSIWYG editor.  But I suspect that the number of folk for
whom that is the threshold impediment to using Emacs for "writing
letters and handouts" is exceedingly small.  That user experience
would be akin to the earliest versions of MS Word or WordPerfect: all
styling applied manually.

Today Emacs is able to understand the structure of the text in a
buffer based on its mode (either because the contents is created and
maintained entirely by elisp code or because the mode knows how to
parse the buffer's contents).  Given such understanding the mode can
then do an intelligent job refilling, reformatting and rendering.

Until Emacs has some way of modeling the structure of a text document
I doubt that we will see any significant uptake in its use a
LibreOffice replacement.

/john



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]