Editing text in Emacs then pasting into something like Outlook

Editing text in Emacs then pasting into something like Outlook

[Ludwig, Mark]

I need commands like M-a (sentence-forward) to maximize my
productivity when writing large swaths of text, so use Emacs for it.
I learned M-a and M-e so long ago, that sometimes my fingers will hit
one of them before I realize I'm not in Emacs....

Has anyone written code to take a region or a file of plain ASCII text
written in Emacs using classical block style (with paragraphs wrapped
as in this e-mail) and transform it into something suitable for
pasting into MS Word or Outlook as raw text?  (I manually unwrap using
M-^ and C-p interactively, starting at the end, backing up to the
beginning.)

This means two newlines before the second through Nth paragraph in my
case, because I usually use extra paragraph marks to make space before
the following paragraph.  I'm only looking for code to "unwrap" the
text; for extra credit, actually shove it into the appropriate
cross-application "clipboard" buffer.  (I copy the unwrapped region
using M-w now.)

I took a whack at rolling my own unwrap code a few years ago, but it
failed in a few cases.  I will ask for advice on it here if there is
no better existing solution.  Please let me know of existing solutions
to this problem.  I happen to be running Emacs on Windows, but really
want a solution for all platforms, because I want this sort of thing
on UNIX periodically too.

Oh, one of the finer points here is dealing with sentences that end at
the end of a line.  (I use the traditional Emacs default, so of
course, I consistently want two spaces between paragraphs.)

Thanks!
Mark Ludwig

Re: Editing text in Emacs then pasting into something like Outlook

[Teemu Likonen]

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Mark Ludwig [2013-04-30 14:29:20 +00:00] wrote:

> Has anyone written code to take a region or a file of plain ASCII text
> written in Emacs using classical block style (with paragraphs wrapped
> as in this e-mail) and transform it into something suitable for
> pasting into MS Word or Outlook as raw text? (I manually unwrap using
> M-^ and C-p interactively, starting at the end, backing up to the
> beginning.)

How about setting fill-column to a very large value, like 999999 and
then fill-paragraph (M-q)?

I use my own flowing-text-mode when editing text with one-line
paragraphs. Here's the definition:


    (define-derived-mode flowing-text-mode text-mode "Text[flow]"
      "Major mode for editing text with long flowing lines."
      (visual-line-mode 1)
      (whitespace-newline-mode 1)
      (set (make-local-variable 'tab-stop-list)
           (number-sequence 4 100 4))
      (setq indent-tabs-mode nil
            fill-column 99999))

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Re: Editing text in Emacs then pasting into something like Outlook

[eqyiel]

While searching for a solution a few months ago, I borrowed some code
from Xah Lee [1], but replaced his bigFillColumnVal "4333999" with
most-positive-fixnum, which changes depending on the system - I think.
On mine it is 2305843009213693951.

There is also a slightly more readable implementation I found on
StackOverflow [2].  I now have it bound to M-q.  Works great!

[1] http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/modernization_fill-paragraph.html
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/14992483/2204400

RE: Editing text in Emacs then pasting into something like Outlook

[Ludwig, Mark]

> From: eqyiel@gmail.com, Tuesday, April 30, 2013 11:30 PM
 
> While searching for a solution a few months ago, I borrowed some code from
> Xah Lee [1], but replaced his bigFillColumnVal "4333999" with most-positive-
> fixnum, which changes depending on the system - I think.
> On mine it is 2305843009213693951.
> 
> There is also a slightly more readable implementation I found on StackOverflow
> [2].  I now have it bound to M-q.  Works great!
> 
> [1] http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/modernization_fill-paragraph.html
> [2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/14992483/2204400

I like to say "never is a long time," but this seems to violate the
predictability of the behavior of M-q such that I truly /never/ would
have thought to make this part of what M-q does....  (I /can/ see the
utility of it when used purely interactively, but doesn't the
self-inverting state information need to get reset on movement 
of point across paragraph boundaries?)

Mostly I won't modify M-q, I suppose, because I want to be able to use
it in macros.  I am thinking about using a prefix argument
(interactively) on M-q to invoke the "unfill" behavior, so it would be
C-u M-q.  (I don't intend to need this frequently, instead using a
separate Emacs frame showing a buffer I'll use for my copy/paste.
Thanks to Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi>, this buffer will be in the
previously-shared flowing-text-mode, where original (fill-paragraph) on 
M-q will do the right thing.)

Thanks!
Mark