Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video

[Ben McGinnes <ben@adversary.org>]

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On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 12:11:27AM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
>> 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)?
> 
> Sure, ideally.

Well, ODF does have a flat file format which can make it a little
easier to work with, though it's been a few years since I last did
anything like that.  Actually, maybe more than a few.  IIRC, though,
DOCX is far less painful under the hood (which is annoying, but not
much we can do about that now).

>> 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.
> 
> It is fine to make use of external free programs to do the job,
> provided that gives good practical results.

Then that opens up a lot of options, especially for intermediate
solutions to produce the desired output prior to achieving WYSIWYG
functionality in Emacs.  You should certainly be able to achieve
WYSIWYM right now.  Org-mode effectively already does.

Mainly, though, I was thinking of taking advantage of the fact that
the existing document formats already used are XML formats then you
could just utlise that and XSLT to go from some simpler format and
interface to produce whatever you want.  There's already plenty of
existing support within the GNU project, so why not use it?

> Perhaps I didn't make this clear, but the goal I have in mind
> includes WYSIWYG display of formatted text.

Yeah, I thought so, hence the "ambitious" comment.

>> OTOH, there are reasons I almost never use Emacs to write fiction 
> 
> Would you like to explain why?  We might learn something from seeing
> your reasons.

Fair enough.  For me it's a combination of function and state of mind;
Emacs can only really affect the former, of course.

I suspect much of the functionality issues could probably be gotten
around with some custom major and/or minor modes.  There are certain
things which are generally just done with styles or templates that
most purely text based editors would address by inserting additional
content (e.g. extra blank lines, special characters, etc.).  Ligatures
would be very nice, but are less of a concern when the publishing
software[1] will take care of that properly later.

Smart quotation marks for either single or double quotes are pretty
much essential for anything dialogue related (so ‘ or ’ instead of ',
except when the latter is just an apostrophe - though that does get a
little more finicky sometimes, and “ or ” instead of ").  As well as
"smart typing" like always capitalising the lone "i" or fixing
capitalisation on a new sentence is frequently exploited when writing
a lot.  There's almost certainly several other things which aren't
coming to mind because normally I don't need to think about them.

To put into perspective how much a difference these little things can
make:  I think my record in one writing session was a chapter of about
20,800 words in around 21 hours.  Doing that without all those little
features would either take far longer (and risk interrupting the
writing flow), or significantly increase the amount of manual editing
required later.

The state of mind thing is more a matter of encouraging the creative
flow and sometimes that means manipulating the way I see the text as I
write it (the nature of which generally varies according to the
subject matter).  Usually, though it just comes down to never having
to really think about doing something with the software other than
just write.

At the moment LibreOffice does all that and more, which makes it ideal
for fiction and longer political work.  With the added bonus of not
generally making my mind follow more technical paths when I look at
it.  Which is something Emacs does with me to a large extent, since
it's so integral to many of my more geeky pursuits.  I've certainly
quite happily used it to write technical documentation[2] and code,
and no doubt will continue to do so.  It's even helped with part of my
little Unicode cheat sheet,[3] even though that's still mostly done in
LibreOffice.[4]


Regards,
Ben

 1. My publishing platform is rather more technical than the scope of
    this thread, so I'm leaving that part out.

 2. Like this (using Org-mode and its XHTML export):
    http://files.au.adversary.org/crypto/gpgme-python-howto.html

 3. http://files.east1.us.adversary.org/files/UnicodeNotes.pdf

 4. Because Emacs still beats everything else for inserting code
    points from plane 1 or above.  The relevant part of my ~/.emacs
    file for displaying most of the current Unicode spec is at the end
    of the PDF linked above.

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