Re: viewing docx files

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> BTW, I think many people (including myself) would be interested in an
>> alternative to doc-view-mode which renders such documents as (decorated)
>> text rather than as images, e.g. going through HTML and then rendered
>> with shr.el.
> Does `pdf-tools' do anything close?

Kind of, except that Emacs doesn't really see the text.  pdf-tools does
a great job at making the text accessible to Emacs on demand, but all
the features have to be supported "by hand".  If Emacs could really
directly see the text, then C-s would work without any need to write
specific code.  I.e. there would be no need for pdf-isearch.el,
pdf-occur.el, etc...

Clearly, it would suck at "rendering faithfully", since Emacs's
rendering engine is not sophisticated enough to handle the kind of
layouts seen in typical PDF files, so it wouldn't be a competitor to
pdf-tools.


        Stefan