Re: Saving markup formats

[Oliver Scholz]

Reiner Steib <address@hidden> writes:

> [ I'd suggest to move this discussion to emacs-devel ]
>
> On Sat, Jun 16 2007, Richard Stallman wrote:
>
> [ Juri Linkov: ]
>>     What are the most preferable formats to save markup?  One variant is
>>     Enriched text.  It was designed for using in e-mail, but actually nobody
>>     uses it nowadays.  Most people prefer HTML in e-mail as a replacement of
>>     plain text.
>>
>> HTML would be useful.  RTF would be useful.  XML would be useful.
>> The old Word format would be useful, at least to be able to read it.
>> If you implement any of these, it will be a nice contribution.
>> If you implement more than one, even better.
>
> Oliver Scholz <address@hidden> (Cc-ed) has done some work on an
> RTF reader for Emacs a couple of years ago.  Maybe his work is useful
> in the current context.  Oliver has signed papers for Emacs (past and
> future changes) and I'm quite sure he'd assign this code as well.
>
> Here's the summary from the project page:
>
> ,----[ http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/emacs-rtf/ ]
> | This package aims to implement the "Rich Text Format" (RTF), version
[...]

This is a very old project of mine, and an abandoned one, I am afraid.
Of course, anybody is free to make use of the codebase, but I for
myself am convinced that it is the wrong approach. I did some further
work on the issue of processing XML or RTF or HTML documents in Emacs,
but it is an uphill struggle. And because it is---if done well---a
little too big for somebody with a notorious lack of time, this has
been sleeping for quite a while. Parsing is not the problem. (Though
for XML: none of the existing XML parsers would do the job. You need
CDATA in a buffer, not as strings in a list.)


    Oliver
-- 
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