Re: Emacs as word processor

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

Richard Stallman writes:

 > I use TeX to write a manual, and also when I want to send a nicely
 > formatted letter; but I wish I could do the latter WYSIWYG in Emacs.

OK.  But I don't think that's a very big benefit compared to the
amount of work entailed.  It will be much easier (as somebody suggested
already) to produce a variant set of keybindings for LibreOffice that
more closely approximates Emacs bindings.

As for accessing the power of Emacs from your wordprocessor, most
office suites nowadays understand embedded URIs and/or MIME types, and
can bind arbitrary applications to them.  I would think that in many
cases it should be possible to create "emacs:" URIs or an
"application/emacs-lisp" MIME type that could be linked to (with the
effect of using emacsclient to send code to a running Emacs process)
to get various effects.  Ugly, inefficient, and clumsy, but it
probably could be made to work for a lot of use cases.

 > But there are so many people who don't use Emacs or TeX.  They use
 > WYSIWYG word processors only.  I wish we could make Emacs easy for
 > them to use,

Now that is a goal we can all support, I'm sure.  But please take into
consideration that for 99% of the "so many people", "easy to use" is
not just a matter of software UI (including display and layout
features).  It's mostly about file format support, and that support
needs to be very high quality on input, output, and "throughput"[1]
before more than a very few people will use it "in anger".  This is
going to take a huge amount of effort, a large fraction of that
available to the Emacs projects for several years (a decade or so).


Footnotes: 
[1]  Office suites which are capable of reading most formats received,
and outputting new files that are readable when transmitted to others,
nevertheless frequently mangle files received from others in editing.