Subject: Re: Wordprocessor - Tom responds. From: physadm@phys.canterbury.ac.nz (Andrew McGregor, rm ,ext ) Date: Fri, 28 May 1993 04:15:29 GMT
In article 93May27152151@peach.ucs.indiana.edu, wmperry@peach.ucs.indiana.edu (William M. Perry) writes:
>rawn@Seagull.RTD.COM (Rawn Shah) writes:
>>Per Abrahamsen (abraham@research.att.com) wrote:
>>
>>: Given your relatively modes goal and desire to actually get something
>>: done, you should consider writing it in Emacs 19. Emacs 19 already
>>: have the primitives for different fonts, colour, scrollbars, menus,
>>: and much more. Your work would be to combine them into a
>>: wordprocessor, redefine the interface with menus plus accelerator
>>: keys, write any missing primitives (e.g. inclusion of pictures), and
>>: provide the tools for printing the documents. Not a small task, but
>>: more likely to succeed than writting it from scratch. And it might
>>: lead to a job at FSF, Cygnus, or Lucid :-)
>>
> Any other emacs hackers out there that would like to work on this? (Not
>sure how much time I'll have this summer (19 credit hours!), but in the
>fall it would be great).
>
> Design considerations in emacs:
>
> 1. Store normal text as normal text. :)
> 2. For anything weird (lists, tables, etc), store the actual LaTeX
> formatting codes in the data segment of a region (Lucid extents,
> Epoch zones, Emacs zones). (I've got some functions to emulate
> zones in vanilla emacs 18.59, so this wouldn't be a problem)
> 3. For pictures, run LaTeX or something similar, produce a dvi file,
> and convert the dvi file to another format, and include that in the
> buffer as a separate zone, and have the data segment of the zone be
> the commands to create the file. (This would entail something like
> WP5.1's equation editor - abbreviated forms of common math symbols,
> we'd output LaTeX.) For pictures - a hacked version of xfig to save
> in LaTeX only?
3.1 Ditto for equations and tables. Make a decent table editor (!)
> 4. To save in other formats, translate from LaTeX. :)
> 5. To print, just output LaTeX, latex it, print the DVI file.
> 6. Others?
>
> Anyone else interested in this? I really don't think it would be
>incredibly difficult. (Famous last words)
>
> -Bill Perry
This is interesting. It will probably be easiest in the forthcoming
lucid/epoch merge, which will have the lucid 'great redisplay rewrite'
done, and thus better mixed fonts and size code.
Some of this will be incredibly difficult, some will be easy.
Can't much of the input model for this be taken from an existing LaTeX
mode for emacs? Certainly these have many utility functions that would
be useful.
What about BibTeX?