Re: Towards a WYSIWYG word processing (was: What improvements would be truly useful?)

[John Yates]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 12:18 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> From: John Yates <address@hidden>
>>
>> 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.
>
> I think you have in mind much more sophisticated word processor than
> it would take to make significant progress in this area relative to
> what we have now.  Extending enriched.el to do a few things it
> currently can't will already be a huge step forward, in that it will
> allow users who want that to produce reasonably pretty documents in
> Emacs, send enriched/text emails, etc.

I am quite curious what "few things" you have in mind.

I have no doubt that with filling in the presence of variable width fonts
and with some extensions to enriched.el it will be possible to compose
documents which, when viewed by a third party, look workman-like.

My skepticism is around the experience of authoring those  documents.
Until we have something akin to  paragraph styles and templates that
experience is going to feel primitive and tedious.  Hence my contention
that if we are going after the WYSIWYG use case then we need more
or uptake simply will not occur.

(My understanding is that Richard's vision includes WYSIWYG editing,
though I could be wrong.)