Re: (Newbie) How to turn AutoFill-mode on/off

[Michael Slass <miknrene@drizzle.com>]

Elaine Sims <esims@mac.com> writes:

>
>I'm a writer.  And I have just started learning Xemacs and have found
>that it's editing capabilities are superior to any wordprocessor I've
>ever used. (like C-x-t, C-x-e, C-t, etc,etc).
>
>But the problem is: typing in text-mode and seeing the little arrow
>at the end of the line and the breaks mid-word is a distraction.  I'm
>much more comfortable looking at the screen in auto-fill mode.
>
>But then if I open the text in a word processor (AbiWord, Word) it
>retains the line breaks, which I have to manually delete to reform
>the paragraphs.  If I have to do that to a 100,000 word manuscript
>I'll go crazy.
>
>Actually the only reason I'm opening the file at all in a word
>processor is because I haven't learned how to format and print out my
>manuscripts from Xemacs (with double spacing and headers and page
>numbers) yet.
>
>If I could do it all from within Xemacs that would be preferrable.
>
>And I'm not adverse to learning a little LISP to do it.
>
>Any help I can get would be appreciated.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Elaine
>

OK.  You should learn LaTeX.  It has a fairly steep learning curve,
but it is the standard UNIX way of producing typeset documents, and
there's a very good reason.  The standard LaTeX styles produce all the
things you mention above, and many more, and there are additional
style files to do anything else you can think of.

Your document will consist of your words and strings of commands to
LaTeX.  The length of your lines will be irrelevant, because LaTeX
will typeset each paragraph appropriately, so you can turn on
auto-fill at a width that's comfortable for you during editing, and
not think about it any more.

You will *definitely* need a copy of Leslie Lamport's book:

_LaTeX: A Document Preparation System_

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201529831/qid=1038080753/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/104-7996619-8519144


Also, you will be very happy with auctex-mode, an elisp package
designed to facilitate preparation of LaTeX documents.  It may or may
not have been included with your distrubution of emacs, but you can
find it and instructions for installing it by google-ing for
auctex.el.  AucTex lets you control all of your document preparation
from within emacs.

LaTeX is not WYSIWYG -- there is a cycle of edit, compile, view to see
how your document will look, but with a reasonably fast computer (the
thesis I'm not writing at this moment while I'm chatting with you is
25K words, and renders in about 20sec on my P3 450) the cycle is not
unduly long.

The web is full of LaTeX tutorials, and comp.text.tex has a large and
knowledgeable reader base.

Good luck.
-- 
Mike Slass