Re: Text processor

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, Stephen Rust wrote:
> Personally, I think that any word processor or document editor that saves
> things in a proprietary format (i.e: not using open standards), or at
> least doesn't allow the exporting of the data to an open standard format
> is something that won't be too usable in the future.  At least won't be
> usable to me.

I think even LyX puts special magic in its LaTeX files.

You need to save more info than something like DocBook saves. You don't
care about the details of something like DocBook or LaTeX. If you want
something that works, soon, then you should just write a simple data
structure and trivially convert to and from a standalone XML document to
write it to disk. Easy to implement, works great.

You need to save information such as: the size of the window, the current
cursor position, etc. That's why you need a proprietary format. You can
export to other formats if you like.

I would probably save in XML, but XML is just syntax; it isn't a
"format" in any real sense (you can't load an arbitrary XML document and
expect to do anything with it).

>  I want to write my book, or my document easily not worrying
> about the formatting too much, just clicking on a few simple choices for a
> particular document block (whether its a title, a paragraph, etc.), and
> then I want to export it to any number of formats so its readable and
> usable by people trying to access the data from anywhere.  Whether that be
> printed in postscript, posted to the web as html/xml or converted to pdf
> for all those pdf people.
> 

Yes, it is trivial to dump a tree-structured document to any other
comparable format (tex, html).

> If you again take Lyx as an example, your document format is saved as
> latex, but you can also export to a number of other formats.  And the
> structure is implicit as you suggest.  An enhancement would be to have a
> tab where you could bring up the actualy "structural" formatting tags,
> where you could see them if you wanted to, but they wouldn't interfere
> with the main document if you didn't want to.
>

Yes, I suppose LyX is the closest thing to what I'm talking about. I'm not
sure it's exactly what I'm talking about; the LaTeX underneath is a bit
crufty (I would rather store something simpler natively, and export to
LaTeX), and the GUI really needs replacing. But it's nice. Lots of people
like it a lot.
 
Gnome-LyX would be nice. There's a sort of white paper on their web site
about making it GUI-independent, but I'm not sure anyone's doing the work.

I'm not sure if LyX could be made as simple and friendly as I would like.
Maybe it could.

> Yep.  The reason I got interested also.  I wanted to have something very
> easy to use, and just be able to "do it" without having to worry about the
> formatting like you had to do with your standalone XML format and things.
> Adding DocBook support to an editor similar to Lyx is something I have on
> my todo list for the new editor I've been working on.  So, previously
> where you've said XML or SGML are far too generic for an editor like this,
> perhaps doing the editor not for the generic languages, but for a specific
> DTD like DocBook (or LinuxDoc like Lyx support right now) will make it
> possible for people to add on the functionality for their own DTD in the
> future, rather than trying to support the entire standard to begin with.
> 

Something that just did DocBook would be a start. Eventually I would like
to let people define their own "tags" from the GUI though, so that would
make DocBook as the native format sort of useless (I'd rather just have
DocBook as one of the export formats). I guess it would be fairly trivial
to import DocBook too. 

Havoc