Re: RTF for emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

>> But if I had to do those short documents (and
>> couldn't use plain text) I would want something that
>> still isn't "compiled".
>
> There's html along with html editors like mozilla.

No, HTML is compiled as well. You write HTML, save the
file, switch to the browser, hit the reload key (which
I have `r' in Emacs-w3m - let's see, maybe I still
remember? - F5 for the Joe Sixpack IE?) - and then you
see the final result. This compilation of course cannot
be compared to for example C with gcc (which has to
optimize advanced algorithms etc.) but it is still a
mapping from one representation (HTML) to another
(interactive text and/or graphics). And, apparently it
the process advanced enough for the big GUI browsers to
still not having it look the same (I remember there was
an ACID test - "acid", as it involved coloured boxes in
a psychedelic way).

> Org is heaven for people who think like programmers.
> And by 'think like a programmer' I mean thinking
> structurally rather than presentationally and looking
> for a way to batch-mode boring repetitious
> activities.  And of course batch-mode and wysiwig are
> not compatible.

Well, that depends. If you mean the horrible WYSIWYG
editors, than no. But isn't plain text the "true" what
you see is what you get?

> Yes org will compress links and in general nesting
> (headings) structure but its focus is always on
> structure, not presentation.

That's cool, and that's how I use LaTeX (but I think
you could do pixel plotting even if you wanted to) -
and that what the web aspires to be (with CSS), but I
think that will be completed in a distant future, if
ever. But even if they do some progress with CSS I
don't think it can ever compete with LaTeX when it
comes to the "PDF domain", static documents and
stuff. For the web, obviously I don't recommend PDFs
and I get frustrated when I Google some techno-science
thing and get only PDFs as hits.

> For the presentation you need to call export -- a
> keystroke away.  Analogous to a programmer calling
> the compiler

Yeah, that's OK for the rare document in LaTeX but for
every document - this post, for example - to compile
it, review, compile again, OK, looks nice, send - I
don't know how many mails and posts I send a day but if
I had to compile each that would be devastating. I
would have to change my activity and workflow
completely. But remember I don't produce the "third
kind" of documents that the OP theorized about, so I
don't have this problem at all (phew).

> If that is not to your taste then as I said use html.
> Yeah org has nifty export-to-html. But its
> uni-directional.

Well... what do you mean "use HTML"? I'm sort of over
building webpages but if I were to do it again I would
use HTML & CSS, of course. I'm not going to use HTML
for anything else and if I am to use HTML for the web
I'll just edit the .html and .css files in Emacs, in
the html-mode and css-mode.

> Just like a C compiler can produce assembly.  I can
> edit the assembly if I like but its not possible to
> go back from modified assembly to correspondingly
> changed C.

I'm not following?

> Of course the same situation obtains for latex.  One
> can go from latex to pdf and then edit the pdf in
> acrobat or some such.  This is so ridiculously hard
> that no one even thinks of it!

I never thought about it for another reason: why would
you want to do it?

-- 
underground experts united:
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573