Re: Emacs as word processor

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > > Of course you can write code that discards those properties, but
 > > really, that's not what you want.  Some properties should never be
 > > copied (and for the exceptions, it's not that burdensome to query and
 > > reapply those properties).  That should be an attribute of the
 > > property itself, not the code that copies or moves text.
 > 
 > We have yank-excluded-properties for that.

Yeah, but it currently contains only one presentation property
(invisible) by default.  Things like a particular font or color used
for emphasis are likely to be incorrect in a different document, and
occasionally even when moved to a different context in the *same*
document.  Indentation, enumeration, marginal annotations similarly.

My point is that dealing with these cases is going to require
attention to a lot of fine detail, and the text-property API is much
coarser than that.  Of course you could proliferate properties
("non-copyable-face"), and add code to deal with them.  But having an
additional level of indirection (which is being called "style" in this
thread) is going to be very useful in organizing these things.