Re: Text processor

[Alan Shutko <ats acm org>]

Havoc Pennington <rhp@zirx.pair.com> writes:

> However, the appearance of the document should use font size, bold,
> italics, etc. instead of markup tags to display the structure. 

Do you want to enter tags, or use menus to format things?  What DTD do
you want to be able to display visually, or do you want things to
display via DSSSL or XSL?  (Naturally, that would be harder.)

> LaTeX's escape sequence requirements are even worse than tags (try
> entering C code with lots of underscores...)

That's why you shouldn't do it.  Use lgrind!

> There should be an outline view, basically a table of contents, in a tree
> widget. (this might be tricky in either Emacs).

Speedbar can do this now for lots of things, including LaTeX, I think.
Not sure if it will nest things, though... it would be a useful
addition.

> You should be able to rearrange the order of the document's
> sections, delete sections, and jump to any section from the tree
> view.

Ok.

> Structural markup application should be smart. For example, if you hit
> return after a section title, a paragraph section should immediately
> begin. The font should change accordingly.

Is this information anywhere in (say) a DTD?  Or would you have to
have some other way to inform Emacs what you want to follow what. 

> Markup should also have *nice* shortcuts; Control-I maybe would italicize
> until the next time you hit space, Control-Shift-I until the next time you
> hit period.

I don't agree with those keystrokes, since they don't work on text
terminals and conflict with other Emacs bindings.  Would C-c C-i, for
instance, be acceptable?

> You should be able to export the structured format to LaTeX and HTML, at
> least.

That's the job of the language you're editing, unless you're
suggesting that Emacs have its own structured format.  I'd prefer to
develop a set of tools which can (at least) be used with different
SGML or XML dtds, because they already take care of things like tocs,
references, image inclusion, conversion, etc.  I think that developing
something in emacs to take the place of things like DocBook would be a
waste of time, esp since I'd have to end up writing translations into
all that stuff.

OTOH, if all someone wants is a basic WP with formatting, I wouldn't
have a problem extending enriched-text mode to do it.

> There should be nice word count, search, and other commonly-used features.

It's really surprising that Emacs doesn't have word count (XEmacs
does) but it's easy to do.  Is there anything wrong with the various
searches that Emacs already offers?

> Basically, people who are writing books and articles don't care about
> formatting at all; they just need to get the text, its structure, section
> titles, cross-references, and bold/italic as needed.

Would something like AUC-TeX for DocBook satisfy this need?  In other
words, a set of tools which know lots about DocBook and can provide
specific help for lots of different tasks?

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - Looking for a job in Long Island!
Check http://rescomp.wustl.edu/~ats/ for a resume.
Mind your own business, then you don't mind mine.