Re: Emacs as word processor

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Cc: Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden>,
>     address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 11:15:08 +0900
> 
>  > Indentation and justification are no different.
> 
> Ah, but they *are* different, at least potentially.  Default line
> spacing can be implemented by changing the depth of the character box,
> uniformly without respect to the identity of the character, for all
> characters covered by that face.  (I suspect that's how this works in
> Emacs; XEmacs doesn't have the feature AFAIK.)

I don't think I understand what you mean by "depth of the character
box".  Emacs just computes the pixel y-coordinate of the next line
differently when this property is used.

> Indentation and justification are much more complex: they depend on
> the semantics of the text, possibly including the particular
> characters.  For example, in Japanese typography, punctuation and
> certain ligatures are allowed to protrude on the right margin in
> fully justified text.  And line spacing *also* should have a variant
> that applies to larger units of text.

Sorry, I don't see the difficulties.  Emacs already examines the
properties of each character when it displays text, and its word-wrap
and truncation/continuation decisions already take issues similar to
the above into consideration.

>  > [Structured styles] is the source of all evil in Office.  The
>  > result is a terrible mess where the user ends up having no control
>  > on what is going on in her document (except for very short
>  > documents).  No, thanks.
> 
> No, that's not the problem.  The problem is that *Office separates
> editing of styles from editing of the document, making style editing
> the province of experts.  And *Office does a rather sucky job on
> things like indentation and mark formatting of bullet lists and
> enumerations (at least in Japanese documents).

No, the problem is that if you make changes in some part of text that
modify its typeface or indentation or properties of the numbered list,
these changes suddenly affect the entire document.

> Concretely, if you edit a section heading's style (eg, changing
> Helvetica to Times New Roman), Emacs could issue a query asking
> 
>     Do you want to edit just this instance?
>     Change font family to /Times New Roman/ in section headings at:
>     [All levels] [This level] [This heading only] [Cancel]
>     [ ] Review exceptional headings at affected levels

Nuisance, if done by default.  When I edit a piece of text, I mean to
edit only that piece of text.  If I want to edit all pieces of text
that use some style, I should say-so in advance.