Re: Text processor

[larry marso com]

Haven't you just described LyX?  Available today.  Stable, not beta?

www.lyx.org

On Sat, Jun 19, 1999 at 03:02:26PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> 
> 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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-- 
-lsm