Re: Emacs as a word processor

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2020 at 7:18 AM
> From: "yarnton--- via Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> To: "Gregory Heytings" <ghe@sdf.org>
> Cc: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>, "Emacs Devel" <emacs-devel@gnu.org>, 
> "Richard Stallman" <rms@gnu.org>, "Daniel Martín" <mardani29@yahoo.es>
> Subject: Re: Emacs as a word processor
>
> You could probably implement all these functions with a minimal layer on top 
> of org-mode, as it does support a lot of functionality already. 
> Interoperability with docx and odt is harder unless you go down the rabbit 
> hole of getting close to feature parity with them. Otherwise it will be 
> one-way only.
> 
> IMHO, since Emacs is mostly plain text oriented it is going to be hard to go 
> beyond supporting what Org already offers. Which is quite a lot: Hierarchical 
> structure, different text formats, figures, tables, footnotes, metadata, very 
> flexible exporting capabilities...
> 
> I would rather see Org getting more polished, friendlier and better 
> documented. It's pretty well known and it has the potential to attract more 
> Emacs users because it offers some unique features. But people tend to get 
> scared away by it's apparent complexity. And frankly, the basics are really 
> simple.

I support the idea.  Org-Mode is more appropriate.  Then keep Standard Emacs as 
a plain text
programming editor.
 
> One area that could benefit from some improvements is reference management. 
> Org offers footnotes, which are not quite the same as proper first-class 
> references or citations.
> 
> 
>