Re: Text processor

[Stephen Rust <steve tp org>]

Havoc,

What you describe is almost exactly what lyx (www.lyx.org) has started,
and what I have taken a great interest in lately.  It is not exact WYSIWYG
and you concentrate more on document content, not document format.  The
editor does the built-in formatting things, and you can export to a number
of formats.  (latex, postscript, dvi, and linuxdoc sgml in lyx so far).

My goal is to go even further and supply this type of editor in the gnome
environment, exporting and supporting as many formats as possible.  I
won't talk more about it though, since I don't have any code to show yet,
but i'm hoping to have a very early release soon.

Gnome-Feature-Plug: The gnome-canvas is a wonderful thing. :)

Anyway, this type of editor is very powerful in my opinion, with the
functionality of a lot of what you described here below.  

Steve

> I'd like to have a way to write a "documents." By that I mean a structured
> document, LaTeX-like. i.e. not WYSIWYG and not a primitive desktop
> publishing app.
> 
> However, the appearance of the document should use font size, bold,
> italics, etc. instead of markup tags to display the structure. This is
> just to make it easier to see what you're writing. Tags make it very hard
> to proofread and get a sense of things, and I always end up converting
> DocBook or my custom XML thing to HTML in order to look at it.
> XEmacs can do this, maybe the latest GNU Emacs (I use 19 I think... maybe
> 20). LaTeX's escape sequence requirements are even worse than tags (try
> entering C code with lots of underscores...)
> 
> There should be an outline view, basically a table of contents, in a tree
> widget. (this might be tricky in either Emacs). You should be able to
> rearrange the order of the document's sections, delete sections, and jump
> to any section from the tree view.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> You should be able to export the structured format to LaTeX and HTML, at
> least.
> 
> It should be possible to do cross-references and page numbers properly (as
> in LaTeX, so you don't have to hardcode them).
> 
> You have to be able to insert numbered/captioned figures, but it isn't so
> important to actually display them.
> 
> There should be a way to enter "verbatim" text such as C code.
> 
> There should be nice word count, search, and other commonly-used features.
> 
> Ideally you could extend the set of markup tags that are possible, but I
> don't think that's necessary for a first pass at the problem.
> 
> 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. This stuff can be
> made a lot more efficient than it is in a word processor, and you can add
> nice ways to visualize and work with the document in outline form. Then
> you just need to be able to export to HTML or RTF or something else that
> publishers can deal with.
> 
> Havoc
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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