Re: RTF for emacs

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes:

> I gave a few examples earlier, what about letters?
> What about short documents containing tables and
> diagram?  I often write these at work to explain
> things to other people.
> What about making a document that's just a set of
> photos or pictures?

Letters are perfect for plain text as this conversation
exemplifies. Tables can be used with plain text but it
is often the case they get out of hand and you sit
fiddling trying to get straight margins etc. like an
idiot. Images obviously can't be done in plain text.

For those cases, LaTeX is a good choice, again if the
end result - a PDF - is desired.

I just put together an example in but a few minutes. It
involves a header, a table, and a picture. Have a look
at the source [1] and result [2]. It is very easy. At
that level, it is not more difficult than HTML.

The most advanced stuff I ever did in LaTeX is
this [3]. I don't know how advanced it is but it took
some time, put it that way.

> There may be a fix for that, it's true.  There are
> bunch of other problems though.  In Emacs if you
> ps-print a buffer then it comes with a huge header.
> If you print it normally then the margins are tiny.
> There's no convienent way to include images, such as
> scans of other documents.  This stuff doesn't work
> well because very few people write letters using
> plain text.  I could fix it, but it would probably
> break in the future for that reason.

I never printed directly from Emacs but I used the lpr
(line/laser print[er]) of the
Common Unix Printing System, or cups. I remember there
was once a problem printing special chars but I solved
it. I don't remember how so probably it was a quick
fix. Grep the net.

> I've tried to learn it.  I found it difficult to
> learn and I found the resources on the internet poor.
> Almost all of them seem to assume that the user has
> read one of the books on the subject already.

Like everything else in the pitch-dark computer world,
you are more benefited from books at a later
stage. Stage one is kicking and bending the door open
with you leg. As in, checking out my example, and
modifying it just a bit. Then, every day learn
something new. One thing a day is sufficient (365
things in a year! - except for the leap year when you
learn even more). It is not the Da Vinci code you have
to crack. More like a thousand of nails to hammer, just
like the hammerhead shark.

[1] http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/latex/example/letter.tex
[2] http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/latex/example/letter.pdf
[3] http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/about/matte.pdf

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