emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video


From: Arthur Miller
Subject: Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video
Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 12:43:13 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/28.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Arthur Miller <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 09:55:16 +0200
>> Cc: Robert Pluim <address@hidden>, address@hidden,
>>  address@hidden, address@hidden
>> 
>> > I would like Emacs to have the features of LibreOffice -- at least for
>> > word processing and slides.
>> >
>> > It would take years to get there, but I hope to see it during my lifetime.
>> What do you mean with slides? Presentations? You can already do
>> slides-like stuff in org-mode, not as advanced as in Impress, but enough
>> for many situations. Some presentations are done via pdf-files which you
>> can show from Emacs. You could even use images to create a slide-show
>> mimicking a presentation. Or what features do you have in mind?
>
> So maybe what is missing is a manual or a tutorial describing to users
> how to create presentations using Org?
Could be. There are some tutorials/show-offs on youtube, and some
personal blogs, but maybe some more thought and put toghether manual
could help.

>> For some more advanced graphical features Emacs would need better
>> renderer, ability to display (and script) some graphics, layouting etc.
>
> What is missing for displaying slides?  AFAIK, the current Emacs
> display engine is perfectly capable of displaying text with images.
Slides as images (or pdfs), or even just plain text as some org :slide:
does work just fine as currently is in Emacs. I ment more that people
like to have some more elemnts, like lines, arrows, and
other graphical elements in office applications as well as laying out
those elements and text in a bit more advanced way. For example
text boxes in office apps. I am not sure how easy it is to layout images
and have text wrap around it in Emacs and similar. Maybe latex as a
document format could be fine, if Emacs can render final result as a buffer
view without going to file export/import and displaying back image or
pdf. Same for say html. I think, I am not sure. If Emacs could render
render those directly as buffer view while editing it, I think it would
be the word processor a lá "office".

> Besides, I'm not sure the produced slides should be displayed in Emacs
> in the first place, they can be displayed by some image viewer, of
> which I'm sure there are quite a few on any given system.
>
>> Why is that important for Emacs?
>
> IMO, that's not a valid question to ask about Emacs.  We could ask the
> same about reading and sending email, displaying calendar and managing
> appointments, many Org features, etc. etc.  Emacs users want to do
> many jobs in Emacs, and editing documents is a job that's actually
> closer to the original Emacs purpose than many others.
Fair enough, indeed :-).

>> I haven't personally opened an "office" app for years, unless I had
>> to do something for a customer. I think good text editor like Emacs
>> is more then fine for most needs. I think people "need" office apps
>> mostly because of marketing not because they really need it,
>> especially nowdays when we don't print so much like we did 20 years
>> ago or so. I might be biased here though, it is just my reflection.
>
> Careful: your personal perspective on this stuff is probably heavily
> biased by your line of work and your experience.  There are people out
> there who write documents of various kinds all day every day.
Yeah, I know, I am aware of my modest personal needs. It is just a
reflection on what I see over and over again: when my friends
ask me which office to get, I tell them they good enough with
included WordPad that comes with Windows, or to download Libre/Open
Office if they need more. Most of them bought anyway MS Office, because
it is "the best", even though they will use just like 1% of feature in
it.



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]