Re: Emacs as word processor

[Juan M. Gonzalez <juanmgonzalezrey@gmail.com>]

T.V. Raman <tv.raman.tv <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> I spent about 6 years (2000 -- 2006) investing in XMl  hoping
> that it would give us s-expressions -- sadly it gave everything
> but.
> 
> To me the living proof  of this is  that in 2013, I write org
> files by hand -- in 2001 when I was still dreaming the xml will
> give us s-expressions dream, I wrote xml and html by hand - the
> zenith was nxml-mode -- but though nxml-mode is a marvellous
> piece of work, xml dragged in far too much of the old sgml
> baggage, without bringing much new to the party --
> 
> -- 
> 
> On 12/15/13, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen <at> xemacs.org> wrote:
> > Steinar Bang writes:
> >
> > > FWIW I really would have liked to see an s-expression based text
> > > document file format see actual use.
> >
> > XML! <duck />


About those possibilities, Richard Stallman has been asked, in this thread,
"1. What would you recommend as the backend format?" His answer:

"It would be good to support several, including some use of HTML, ODF, and
maybe Texinfo."

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg00557.html
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/165333

And also about the Org-mode markup as storage format:

"I am sure that it will support this format, because that's not the
hard part."

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg01138.html
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/165914

That's reasonable. If we look at LibreOffice Writer, that RMS has mentioned
as an example, it can save in a good number of different formats: .odt,
.txt, .html, .xml, etc.

And about the compatibility between formats? Let's say we have a document in
a format that allows embedded LaTeX for math formulae, etc., like Org markup
or the latest MultiMarkdown, and we want to save it in a more limited format
such as plain Markdown. That's solved by LibreOffice in a simple way, with a
warning: "This document may contain formatting or content that cannot be
saved in the currently selected file format". However, it lets us go ahead,
and saves what is supported in the format chosen by the user.

So it seems an optional minor WYSIWYG mode that could be used by Emacs major
modes, and which would allow a number of different formats, is a suggested
way. Especially for text markups already supported by Emacs and its
different major modes.