Re: Emacs as a word processor

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1221 bytes --]

A few years ago, I moved from programming to a creative/prose-based career
where I interact almost exclusively with people who use computers as
mostly-replaceable appliances. In this world, interop with MS Word is a
baseline assumption. In my experience, there are many fields that share
this characteristic.

If Emacs wants to be usable for people living in this world, it's not
necessary that Emacs supports all of the various features of doc, docx, or
odt files, but it is necessary that files not be corrupted (to use
Richard's term) by passing through Emacs. Several years ago I cobbled
together a partial solution that used a set of external (Java-based)
converters, but it proved to be fragile and eventually bit-rotted. I
believe that system was based on the idea that the XML-based doc variants
would end up being more open (not free, but published specs) than they
actually were.

From my experience, the next-most important feature for interop is support
for "track changes", as its use is standard practice in many fields, and
anything that doesn't support it is not workable. When last I looked, the
details here were never published by MS, and would need to be
reverse-engineered.

I hope this helps,
~Chad

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1362 bytes --]