Oops, sorry for those weird symbols. I forgot to check the language in which my name will appear on the list.
> I believe I made some progress with my little research concerning suckless > word processing. > Basically, I realised that things get much easier as soon as we realize that > there is no need for paper-centric formats. > First, there is no standard here, that is correctly supported by all office > suites on all platforms: ODF (as well as OASIS) is not getting any decent > popularity any time soon, common MSO formats often lack needed compatibility > (even now when I have to bring .doc files created by OpenOffice to be printed > on a Windows machine with MSO I get my formatting partially lost). > Second, there are lots of restrictions being imposed by those formats. They > all employ the paradigm of paper-centric documents (documents that are > created to be printed), whereas lots of documents people create today (I > would say, almost the majority) won't ever be printed and are actually > intended to be viewed and edited only between computers: be that sharing over > the Net/email, passing them on portable media, etc. Thus, one could actually > switch from paper-centric paradigm to screen-centric paradigm, which changes > the way we think of formatting - e.g. we don't need page numbering, the > references, links and TOC appear in a whole different form. Many other > changes come here. > For documents that will actually get printed one could probably employ > something like LaTeX/lout/troff/etc - and that's the whole different story. > Then I learnt about the fact that Opera employees actually use HTML for all > the documents they share within company. Opera is actually interesting due to > the Opera Show format, which is an approach to creating presentations using > HTML/JavaScript/CSS only + some easy markup. The only drawback (AFAIK) is > that Opera Show is supported only by Opera Browser (there should be addons > for Firefox, though). > Then there is S5 with a similar approach (and I believe, better compatibility > - not sure about IE6, though). > But what about word processing and spreadsheets? > Word processing is easier, since there are lots of lightweight markup > languages (MarkDown being the most famous ones) that support all the basic > formatting and produce an XHTML output. Here one could see what I called a > screen-based approach: when I define the formatting for my text, I actually > define the structure of my text, instead of defining the beautifiers > (bold/italic/underline) or font sizes manually - the language interpreter > does that for me. Besides, lightweight markup languages are nice here, > because usually their tags don't get in the way of a spell checker. > Spreadsheets are a bit trickier. I was looking for a lightweight tool to > produce plain text files that can be easily converted to HTML. There is SC, > which is really nice (only depends on Curses), has VI-like keybindings and > produces .sc files. Which are actually just plain text files with a specific > formatting, that can later be converted to CSV (and be used in xhtml > documents). And I think that it should be pretty easy to convert CSV to any > lightweight markup language syntax for tables. The only drawback with SC is > that it doesn't have Unicode support (the last update of SC was in 2002, when > Unicode wasn't popular enough), so I couldn't get it to work with non-Latin > characters. So I am looking for something similar, but more recent. Any ideas > here? > Second, tools like SC naturally can't produce graphs. I know there are lots > of plot utilities, but I couldn't really find what I needed. What I wanted > was a small (C, preferably) console tool (so that I could invoke it right > from VIM) that could produce images with graphs (or diagrams) using the > provided CSV file. That image can later be used within the resulting xhtml > file. > So, basically, to sum up, this way one can get a pretty flexible single > document type that can easily mix text elements with tables (produced by a > spreadsheet tool like sc) and graphics (be that images or graphs for the > provided data in the tables). This document can be later viewed and edited > (provided we send the source files as well) on literally any machine with a > web browser (including IE6). And of course it can be easily published on the > Web. > This way, one can use almost any text editor that can: > -highlight syntax (for MarkDown or any other lightweight language) > -invoke external tools (for conversion of table files, producing graphs and > the final conversion to html) > -properly wrap lines and words (which is why nano, being a really nice, easy > and tiny editor is not a good solution here) > to replace existing office suites. > What do you think? Can this approach work in real life - for creating > academic papers with non-strict formatting, lecture notes, articles - for > sharing with your friends, teachers or colleagues that may or may not have > any computer skills? > I believe this approach can be easily implemented within Emacs environment > (using org-mode and muse-mode, but I would like to implement this idea in VIM > (or any other text editor), too - but I need a spreadsheet calculator and a > plotter for that. Don't want to cause a flamewar here, of course. > -- wbr, Ilembitov
