Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 09:55:16 +0200
> Cc: Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com>, colinetnathan98@gmail.com,
>  andreas.roehler@online.de, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > I would like Emacs to have the features of LibreOffice -- at least for
> > word processing and slides.
> >
> > It would take years to get there, but I hope to see it during my lifetime.
> What do you mean with slides? Presentations? You can already do
> slides-like stuff in org-mode, not as advanced as in Impress, but enough
> for many situations. Some presentations are done via pdf-files which you
> can show from Emacs. You could even use images to create a slide-show
> mimicking a presentation. Or what features do you have in mind?

So maybe what is missing is a manual or a tutorial describing to users
how to create presentations using Org?

> For some more advanced graphical features Emacs would need better
> renderer, ability to display (and script) some graphics, layouting etc.

What is missing for displaying slides?  AFAIK, the current Emacs
display engine is perfectly capable of displaying text with images.

Besides, I'm not sure the produced slides should be displayed in Emacs
in the first place, they can be displayed by some image viewer, of
which I'm sure there are quite a few on any given system.

> Why is that important for Emacs?

IMO, that's not a valid question to ask about Emacs.  We could ask the
same about reading and sending email, displaying calendar and managing
appointments, many Org features, etc. etc.  Emacs users want to do
many jobs in Emacs, and editing documents is a job that's actually
closer to the original Emacs purpose than many others.

> I haven't personally opened an "office" app for years, unless I had
> to do something for a customer. I think good text editor like Emacs
> is more then fine for most needs. I think people "need" office apps
> mostly because of marketing not because they really need it,
> especially nowdays when we don't print so much like we did 20 years
> ago or so. I might be biased here though, it is just my reflection.

Careful: your personal perspective on this stuff is probably heavily
biased by your line of work and your experience.  There are people out
there who write documents of various kinds all day every day.