Re: word processor document format: what parts?

[Christopher Curtis <ccurtis ee fit edu>]

On Sat, 19 Sep 1998, Todd Graham Lewis wrote:

> What parts should there be to the GNOME word processor's native document
> format?  By this, I mean parts other than normal text.  Also, markup

Hrm.

I've been trying to ignore this thread, but here are my thoughts on a word
processor.  First of all, again, ignore MS.  Please *do*not* try to
duplicate Word.

The only thing that I really miss in Linux is a document processor of the
caliber of Frame Maker (now owned by Adobe).  I started a spec of a word
processor some time ago but stopped short of anything useful.  It involved
classes of styles with inheritance, much like DeScribe, which I never used
enough to get a really good opinion of.

Given the source release of Mozilla, I imagine that there is a good solid
CSS engine being worked on.  I would imagine that this could be used for
document typesetting quite effectively, and would provide true seamless
integration with the web.

I'm not too familiar with CSS so this may be too limited (that's why .pdf
exists, afterall) but I thought I'd make my opinions heard.  As for
interapplication communication (embedding, etc) I don't really have much
to say.  OpenDOC has a good foundation.  Maybe something could be salvaged
from it?

And on a personal note - there's a huge difference between paper and CRT.
The biggest one in my book, second only to maybe the physicality of paper,
is the absence of fingers.  When reading stuff online, you can't stick
your fingers in the pages or dogear pages.  However, it would be nice if
you could do something like double right click on a sentence or paragraph
and have that selection automatically bookmarked on a side-list of sorts,
and single click to flip back and forth.  Naturally, selecting any
bookmark would automatically create a temporary bookmark labeled
"continue" or something that would bring you back to where you were.

I made mention of this to the KDE folks but never checked back to see what
they had to say about it.  I think this would be a Good Thing (tm).

Christopher