Re: (Newbie) How to turn AutoFill-mode on/off

[ken]

Elaine (and other emacsers in the writing business),

I was a writer for awhile and a copyeditor as well.  What you need to
format documents depends on what kind of writing you will be doing, who
you will be submitting it to, and what format they want.

E.g., if your doing technical writing for a company and they want
hardcopy without having you send out your manuscripts to a
typesetter/printer, then I would agree with Michael.  LaTeX will give
you all you want in terms of typesetting.

However, if you don't need all of that, if you don't need to include
formulas and if your publisher is going to be producing the published
hardcopy, then LaTeX is probably overkill; you'll be spending too much 
time learning it and a lot less time actually writing.

If the kind of document your writing is no more typographially complex
than, say, a master's thesis, then I would suggest using HTML.  It'll do
superscripts and subscripts (e.g., for footnotes), italics, bold,
various and variable-sized fonts, tables, and a lot more and quite a bit
more easily than LaTeX.  You can also include diagrams, photos, and 
other images into html docs.  If I were doing my master's thesis today, 
it's what I'd use.  The only thing I could never figure out how to do in 
html was page breaks.  Maybe they've added a tag for that in the past 
five or so years.  Finally, most word processors will read in html, so 
if there's some reason that, in the end, you *absolutely* *must* make 
another change, just about any ole wordprocessor will handle it.

Oh, and emacs has an html-helper-mode to make the work go even faster.


hth,
ken

Elaine Sims at 19:38 (UTC-0000) on Sat, 23 Nov 2002 said:

= Michael Slass  wrote:
= 
= >
= >Elaine Sims <esims@mac.com> writes:
= > ...
= >It will be easier to give you a good answer with a more specific
= >notion of your target.  Tell us what your ultimate goal is, and what's
= >wrong with what emacs is doing for you now, (ie - what are you doing
= >with the doc that makes you not like the line breaking?) and you're
= >likely to get a good answer.
= >
= >-- 
= >Mike Slass
= 
= I'm a writer.  And I have just started learning Xemacs and have
= found that it's editing capabilities are superior to any
= wordprocessor I've ever used. (like C-x-t, C-x-e, C-t, etc,etc).
= 
= But the problem is: typing in text-mode and seeing the little arrow
= at the end of the line and the breaks mid-word is a distraction.  
= I'm much more comfortable looking at the screen in auto-fill mode.
= 
= But then if I open the text in a word processor (AbiWord, Word) it
= retains the line breaks, which I have to manually delete to reform
= the paragraphs.  If I have to do that to a 100,000 word manuscript
= I'll go crazy.
= 
= Actually the only reason I'm opening the file at all in a word
= processor is because I haven't learned how to format and print out
= my manuscripts from Xemacs (with double spacing and headers and page
= numbers) yet.
= 
= If I could do it all from within Xemacs that would be preferrable.
= 
= And I'm not adverse to learning a little LISP to do it.
= 
= Any help I can get would be appreciated.
= 
= Thanks.
= 
= Elaine
= 
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= 


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