Re: Emacs as a word processor

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > 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".

I agree.  In addition, it would be possible to support reading and writing
files that use features that Emacs does not actually handle.

  > 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.

It is fine to provide a way to do that, but it would be very limiting.
It would mean that if your ODT file does anything sophisticated,
Emacs would not only be unable to edit those aspects of it.
but passing the file through Emacs would lose all that information!
You could not use Emacs to do a few tweaks to the simple aspects
of the file, because that would corrupt it.

If you'd like to edit the file in Org format, then you should save it
in Org format, and convert it to ODT at the end if you wish to.
That will be simpler and will run faster.


-- 
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)