Re: Emacs as a word processor (ways to convert Word/RTF proprietary files)

[Jean Louis]

* Tomas Hlavaty <tom@logand.com> [2020-12-29 01:19]:
> On Mon 28 Dec 2020 at 10:26, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> wrote:
> > You can open any file and M-x enriched-mode, and then
> 
> Thanks, I'll have a look at your suggestions.
> 
> > Emacs has already good printing solution. And I get easily PDF
> > files. Now how would your solution be useful?
> 
> emacs-pdf is written in pure elisp and requires no external
> dependencies.
> 
> Anything else I have seen requires huge dependencies and painful
> configuration (postscript, (la)tex, pandoc).

I see that. Good approach.

Just thinking.

pandoc is one huge dependency that people do not realize as we use
package managers, say "install" and it is just there. But if one wish
to reproduce software, the reproducible build for haskell compiler
from sources is almost impossible task. One has to use binary and then
load huge dependencies for simple conversion. TeX and convertors are
all huge depencies to generate PDF File.

Practically those dependencies are not really problem as we have it
easily accessible on GNU/Linux systems. They may be a problem on
Windoze.

For now `emacs-pdf' is usable for English language. For me using other
characters and other languages it does not work, just as Emacs's
`ps-print-buffer' does not work.

Maybe you could provide PDF printing of all possible characters as in
that case it becomes international.