Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Richard Stallman]

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  > I understand that wysiwyg is easier and I understand your concern
  > for delays. I believe those delays would not be noticable for a pamphlet
  > (A4/A5 size?) if you used html as intermediate format.

Could you state your proposed solution more concretely?
How would it work, which programs would it use?

  > * provide a database of predefined paper sizes as specified on:
  >   https://www.papersizes.org/a-sizes-in-pixels.htm
  >   to be used as templates for width and height (in pixels)
  
  > * advice insert funcion(s) to check for current line pixel-width and
  >   pixel-height. If width or height exceed template width and height then
  >   insert ^L to denote page break and move point to next line and insert
  >   text in next line. If width is exceeded maybe it is just enough to
  >   move point to next line, but when height for a page is exceeded one
  >   would need a special char to visualize page break.

If this works reliably, and isn't very slow, it could be good enough.
For this to work reliably requires understanding the width of text
as it will eventually be rendered, including different sizes and
variants (italic, bold, etc).

  > I am not sure how efficient it would be to check for pixel-width and height
  > on every char insertion, maybe there is some better way?

We can arrange to take note of how wide the line is,
update that incrementally in a quick way, then do more
processing when that seems necessary.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)