From: wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) Subject: Re: A Better WordProcessor Idea Date: Sat, 22 May 1993 20:23:15 GMT
There is some disagreement over which kind of user interface and file
format is the best. My suggestions: make the user interface a
separate program, instead of putting everything into one program.
This will make it easy to have several user interfaces, all of which
share the same non-user interface specific text editing and formatting
engine. Check out the implementation of Rob Pike's sam editor for an
example of how this can be done.
About the file format: Using LaTeX has definite advantages, but is not
essential. What is essential, is two things: the `native' file format
must not be binary, because it must be easy to generate with standard
tools (so that tools can be used to generate parts of the text, e.g. a
fancy file listing or screen dump). A mere import function is not
nearly good enough, it's way too clumsy to use.
Also, a text file format makes it easy to debug, and portable (at
least much more so) to other architectures.
The other essential thing is that there needs to be a program to
convert files between the native format and popular other formats (WP,
WfW, WPfW, LaTeX, ...). This needs to be a separate program (so it
can be used in shell scripts), and can be written separately and as a
separate project.
Also, the formatting algorithms from TeX probably are usable in a
WYSIWYG word processor as well, even if they might be less easy to do
than the kind of quick-and-dirty algorithms most DOS wps seem to use
(at least the output from those is usually horrible). Use them if you
can, because if the quality of output is close to TeX, you can get
much more people to use the program. Even if you ignore math: not
everyone uses TeX for math.