Re: Motif support

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> xenodasein--- via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> writes:
>
>> The answer is same as the answer to this question:
>> "How can the old game called Mario is able to have the same HUD on
>> countless platforms?"
>> If you study this the answer will become apparent.
>
> Emacs is not a game based on displaying 8-bit graphics tiles, if that's
> what you mean.  But I'm afraid I don't understand what you're trying to
> allude to here.

Not to be a devil's advocate, but if an 8-bit game can achieve this, than maybe
there is something to learn from it? Don't you think it is an achievement? I am
not trying to be rude or annyoing, just a reflection.

>> I believe we have different pictures in our heads regarding how much of
>> the features of Office is desired inside Emacs, which cancels this
>> this conversation and opens another big one, which I do not want right
>> now.

I have never looked at that list, but when I see it now, I think several of
those listed features are implementable already, as the Emacs is at the
moment. I have commented under those that I think are not impossible to
implement or are not very hard:

> The features I am referring to are the features listed in etc/TODO.
> Here is a copy of that list for your convenience:

>  . export to a PDF file
Isn't that already possible via 3rd party pacakges? Org-mode? 

>  . apply a bold / italic / underline / strikethrough effect
>  . superscripts / subscripts
>  . apply a left / center / right / justified effect
>  . change the font color and the background color
>  . pixel-level text fill, justification, and indentation (so that
>    variable-pitch fonts could be freely used)
Isn't all of this possible already? Anyone interested could attach that to an
svg button, or plain text button for an interested major/minor mode? I did
center, left, right and pixelwise when I tested transparency patach a couple
weeks ago. Org already have syntax to specify bold, italcis
(bugged). superscirpts etc. It could be instead connected to a menu choice or a button.

>  . create a list
What kind of list? Any symbol in emacs is a potential list, what is meant with this.

>  . insert and change a table
What kind of table? org-table? sql-table?

>  . insert a picture
Same as above, you could attach lisp functions to text or svg buttons already

>  . define / use / modify styles
What styles are we talking about here?

>  . use footnotes
>  . change page headers and footers
Doesn't org-mnode already implement this?

>  . save all the properties and settings mentioned above with the text
>    to a file, so that they are restored when later visiting that file
Which file? Emacs does not have custom format. I don't see reason for it to have
one either becaue probably most of people would prefer their text to be readable
in other software. Otherwise dump buffer + text properties as lisp objects to a
file with print and read them back with read. Is that not workable for some
reason? Texr properties are a plist, so they should be dumpable, right? I am not
sure if interval for a text property is internal to C core, of if it is exposed
to Lisp. If it is not exposed, and stored in text property list, than it would
need to be done so or to recieve special care. Sorry if I am not familiar with
all the details, I am not using Emacs in this way, so I never tried this either.