Re: Text processor

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On 19 Jun 1999, Alan Shutko wrote:
> 
> What's wrong with it?  Things can easily be changed.  
> 
> (I've been looking for an excuse to get code into the Emacs
> distribution....)
> 

Heh.:-)

I think you could write a mode for Emacs that would be nice for writing,
but there isn't one.

I'd like to have a way to write a "documents." By that I mean a structured
document, LaTeX-like. i.e. not WYSIWYG and not a primitive desktop
publishing app.

However, the appearance of the document should use font size, bold,
italics, etc. instead of markup tags to display the structure. This is
just to make it easier to see what you're writing. Tags make it very hard
to proofread and get a sense of things, and I always end up converting
DocBook or my custom XML thing to HTML in order to look at it.
XEmacs can do this, maybe the latest GNU Emacs (I use 19 I think... maybe
20). LaTeX's escape sequence requirements are even worse than tags (try
entering C code with lots of underscores...)

There should be an outline view, basically a table of contents, in a tree
widget. (this might be tricky in either Emacs). You should be able to
rearrange the order of the document's sections, delete sections, and jump
to any section from the tree view.

Structural markup application should be smart. For example, if you hit
return after a section title, a paragraph section should immediately
begin. The font should change accordingly.

Markup should also have *nice* shortcuts; Control-I maybe would italicize
until the next time you hit space, Control-Shift-I until the next time you
hit period.

You should be able to export the structured format to LaTeX and HTML, at
least.

It should be possible to do cross-references and page numbers properly (as
in LaTeX, so you don't have to hardcode them).

You have to be able to insert numbered/captioned figures, but it isn't so
important to actually display them.

There should be a way to enter "verbatim" text such as C code.

There should be nice word count, search, and other commonly-used features.

Ideally you could extend the set of markup tags that are possible, but I
don't think that's necessary for a first pass at the problem.

Basically, people who are writing books and articles don't care about
formatting at all; they just need to get the text, its structure, section
titles, cross-references, and bold/italic as needed. This stuff can be
made a lot more efficient than it is in a word processor, and you can add
nice ways to visualize and work with the document in outline form. Then
you just need to be able to export to HTML or RTF or something else that
publishers can deal with.

Havoc