Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video

[Ben McGinnes <ben@adversary.org>]

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On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 11:25:31PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> I would like Emacs to have the features of LibreOffice -- at least
> for word processing and slides.

That's ambitious ...

Would you intend that to produce existing open standard formats
(i.e. mainly OpenDocument Format files, but someone will inevitably
include DOCX and PPTX out of necessity)?

> It would take years to get there, but I hope to see it during my
> lifetime.

Perhaps.  It depends on how much your vision actually requires native
support and how much can be done by utilising existing technology
which GNU Emacs already understands to produce that end result.

Both of those open formats[1] are based on XML.  So there's already
plenty of avenues for generating those more complicated formats from
something more readily edited by Emacs now.

OTOH, there are reasons I almost never use Emacs to write fiction and,
though I do use it in some aspects of preparing or making minor edits
of the pre-publication source files (which are in another XML format),
it's not really the primary tool there either.  Still, my use case is
fairly niche because most word processor users (and *all* slide
presentation users) don't need to care about traditional publishing
standards.

So, edge cases like mine aside, you can probably do a lot of what you
want now.  Though I suspect the org-mode project is in a better
position to make that a reality right now.


Regards,
Ben

 1. Including MS's formats out of practicality; let's skip the quirks
    of their license since people on this list either are, or should
    already be, aware of all that.

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