Re: Emacs as a word processor

[Stefan Kangas]

yarnton--- via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
writes:

> 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.

I don't see why the options are limited to "feature parity" or "one-way
only".  I think there can exist a useful half-way house of "two way
support for odt" even if it is vastly more basic than "feature parity".

> 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...

FWIW, my ideal UI would be: open an odt file and edit it in Org-mode,
save it again as an odt file.  It doesn't matter much to me if some
formatting is removed, as long as the most basic is preserved such as
italics, bold, headings, blockquotes and maybe links.

> 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.

Indeed, this is one of the worst parts of Org-mode now.  But I have a
hard time even conceptually dreaming up what an ideal UI would look
like here.