From: pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) Subject: Re: Let's write a wordprocessor. Date: Fri, 21 May 1993 21:29:27 GMT
In article <1993May21.164956.135283@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu> dlj0@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu (DAVID L. JOHNSON) writes:
...
>I've been following this thread, and am beginning to get a little uneasy with
>the insistence that the thing be LaTeX-based. LaTeX is just a (one of many)
I know people are probably getting a little tired of this thread, but I just
have to say...
I for one, did not say that a WP should be LaTeX based. Rather, I
said it should save in a LaTeX format. There is a big difference.
Doc does this, and there is a reason.
Doc does not require that LaTeX be installed, which is good thing, as
LaTeX is pretty large. Doc would also be less efficient (yes, that
is possible). I do also wish that Doc had an autoformat/manualformat
toggle so that moving things around wasn't so painful.
Another advantage to saving in a LaTeX format is that you can
always login on a tty and work in text mode. And it don't need X.
And the big issue for many, is that LaTeX could be used in the
interrim to back fill missing functionality: postscript support,
printer support, TOC...
LaTeX is an already defined, reasonably complete format. The design
time savings is tremendous. You would be free to implement it any
way you like, as long as the functionality could be expressed in
LaTeX. I don't think that diffences in line breaks would
be such a killer, as long as it was accessible from text mode
somehow.
Doc does it, and includes support for outputting PostScript.
Really, maybe an easier task would be to just debug Doc, and
make IV based on integer :-)
Peter