Re: RTF for emacs

[Robert Thorpe]

I appreciate everyone's replies.

Emanuel Berg distinguishes between different types of documents.
Firstly, there are very simple documents that just contain text, those
can be written as text files.  There are webpages which can be
written in HTML.  Large documents can be written using LaTeX.  ToDo
lists and organization can be written using Org mode.

There's another type of document though, those that are simple, but too
complex to make using plain text.  I was talking about writing letters
earlier.  Even that case is tricky.  Have you tried printing a letter
containing Unicode characters?  On my Xubuntu 12.04 system that doesn't
work, they appear as escape codes.  Unfortunately, lots of programs
still don't treat UTF-8 correctly.

For someone who knows LaTeX writing small documents isn't a problem.  I
have only done a few simple things with LaTeX.  I haven't used AucTex,
only Emac's LaTeX mode.  In my job I write reports in Microsoft Word,
I've never had a opportunity to write a long document in LaTeX.  In the
future, if I have the time I'd like to learn LaTeX.  I understand though
that it's a large and complex system, until I read this discussion I
didn't know there were so many different dialects withe different
capabilities.  It would take me months to learn it properly.  Similarly,
Org mode is complex.  I intend to learn that sometime in the future too,
but I haven't the time at present.  I spend quite a lot of time
organizing things, so I expect that'll be time well spent.

James Freer asked about this first, I think his situation is similar to
mine.  I can't justify the time I'd need to learn LaTeX since I'd use it
so infrequently.  That's why I'll continue using LibreOffice until
something better comes along that won't take too long to learn.

BR,
Robert Thorpe