Re: Emacs as a word processor (ways to convert Word/RTF proprietary files)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2020 10:14:40 +0300
> From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
> 
> - there are Word importing capabilities by using other available free
>   software. Emacs could advise users to install some external software
>   to convert from Word.

There are also Free Software word processors out there, so why do we
insist on having such capabilities in Emacs?

I think you underestimate the amount of pressure applied on any
J.R. Hacker having a daytime job to use MS Office.  You cannot be a
useful and appreciated part of an organization without having to use
those tools, because all the correspondence and all the documentation
is based on that.  And there's no real Free Software alternative,
certainly not based on Emacs.

The alternative solutions you suggest are extremely impractical.  They
require people who know nothing about DOCX, DocBook, XML, ODT, and
other formats to become proficient enough in these to figure out
whether every feature of MS Office can be supported.  (Do _you_ know
if everything is supported?)  You further ask them to be able to
create for themselves a bunch of scripts or programs to convert the
Office files to something else, edit it in Emacs, then convert back
without losing important features of the original document.  You then
ask them to find Emacs packages that allow conveniently and reasonably
WYSIWYG-ly edit the converted Office documents.  (Are you aware of
packages to conveniently edit HTML or XML or DocBook or ODT? what are
they?)

Asking people to jump through such hoops to be able to read and edit a
document created by MS Office is a huge turn-off, and will be rejected
by most people, because in this aspect a word processor is just a tool
to do a job, and do it quickly and efficiently.  Most people don't
have the time and energy, let alone talent and skills, to do a
programming project each time they need to review a document or a
spreadsheet.

This is why it would be useful to have this kind of capabilities in
Emacs: to enable users to visit MS Office documents with "C-x C-f",
edit them in some specialized WYSIWYG Emacs mode, and finally save
them with "C-x C-s".  If under the hood this runs some converters, it
doesn't matter.

> - one of best for me personally is `antiword' it just extracts simple
>   text. But I have no Word files on computer.
> 
> - another good one is Abiword which has Word import/export
>   capabilities on the command line. So a simple Emacs function of few
>   lines could already use Abiword as external convertor and import file
>   into Emacs word processing

So you are saying that, from the Free Software philosophy POV, it is
not okay to have Emacs be able to access such files, but it _is_ okay
to use the likes of Abiword to do the same?  I don't think I see the
logic in that.  If you are opposed to using MS Office file formats,
you should refuse to look at them, in any form or shape, and instead
request that the person who sends them produces them in some free
format instead.  That would be a logical position which I can
understand and respect.