On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:25:57 +0000 (UTC) Hendrik Boom <hend...@topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:41:10 +0100, Jochen Schulz wrote: > > > Hendrik Boom: > >> > >> I'd like a word processor compatible with version control systems > >> (hereafter abbreviated VCS) Having been duly impressed for decades now > >> how useful VCSs are for programming, I'd like to use them for writing as > >> well. > > > > I wonder why you didn't even mention LaTeX in your post. Don't you know > > it or don't you consider it because you need MS Word documents? > > I have no love for Word, and suspect the world might be better off without > it. But my market doesn't share my opinion. Being able to export to > .odt, and then using OpenOffice to export to Word might work. But I don't > think LaTex really does that either. Am I wrong? > it is possible, I believe with tex4ht (if I'm not mistake that's what lyx uses), possibly a few others. Not all things translate well though so expect to have to edit the final result (from experience math is the bigest problem in all types of conversions, after that tables). I think that you can also convert to html and from there to word. > > > >> I use monotone as my VCS. but I don't suppose my trials are unique to > >> monotone. > > > > I kept my whole university-related material in SVN and I wrote my > > diploma thesis in LaTeX. I loved it. > > > >> (3) Word processors that leave text in a human-readable form (properly > >> word-wrapped, for example) cause insertion of a single character (such > >> as a spelling change) to affect the layout of entire paragraphs. > > > > You cannot avoid that except by using linebreaks as paragraphs and have > > your editor do optical linewrapping. > > Another approach would be to use linebreaks as spaces and to have > something explicit as paragraph breaks. It the editor did optical line > unwrapping, this might actually work. > If you work with latex in an editor, most do line wrapping without inserting line breaks, although you would probably need to work with the editor at a sane width so lines won't wrap across the whole screen. I just looked at the lyx source file and it does line wrapping so it may no do what you want, but as it depends on the number of charachters and not character width (should be the same using fixed width fonts in any editor), just changing a letter should change line breaking, adding one is another issue. > > > >> I'm currently using an ad-hoc notation in UTF-8, edited in emacs, > >> formatted by homebrew code. > > > > Why don't you use existing markup languages like Restrucured Text? I > > started to use it to write blog postings (pyblosxom) and after only a > > short time I got used to it. > > The existing markup languages seem to have too much in them. And there's > little agreement between them. Having yet another one -- but under my > control -- makes it possible to keeep it simple and hand-write > translaters to other formats as needed. If there was something standard > and well-supported, it would be damned attractive. > > > > >> Isn't there something that already does most of what I really need? > > > > To me, it sounds like your main problem is to find a smart-enough merge > > program. Hm, I thought there should be plenty, but apt-cache searching > > "merge editor" didn't reveal any useful packages. > > Maybe that's the real problem, yes. Now there is a way of merging that > could work -- take the texts to be merged, break them up one word to a > lne, do the merge on that, and then put lines back together. If I could > pack that into a version-control system, and make sure it does this only > to the proper kinds of files, that would work. > As an editor, I use meld, but it has the same problem as any other working line by line, so changing line breaks messes up the diff. it can however mark what letters on the line changed, for some things it's enough. You may also want to look at wdiff. It compares files word by word instead of line by line. > -- hendrik > > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
