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A teaser for an idea

I have been think­ing on what I re­al­ly re­al­ly want in a word pro­ces­sor. And then what would it take to cre­ate such a thing.

A few min­utes of play­ing have led me the way of this teas­er (video here if you can't see it):

Could some­thing come out of it? Who knows.

David Boddie / 2010-02-24 15:17:

I was interested in writing a style-oriented editor based on QTextDocument. I got to a point where it kind of worked, but the style management was a real mess. Maybe I should put the code somewhere.

Roberto Alsina / 2010-02-25 00:48:

Everyone should *always* put the code somewhere ;-)

markm / 2010-02-24 15:52:

Sounds a bit like a WYSIWYG editor for a Wiki page that then can be exported to different formats.

Don't forget Text as one of your output formats - makes it easy to diff (good for revision control)

danielkun / 2010-02-24 16:27:

I don't get it. What's so special about it? Style templates aren't exactly something new ;-)

sil / 2010-02-24 16:29:

You're describing LyX, my man :)

ironfroggy / 2010-02-25 19:39:

What i was going to say. I don't use LyX enough.

voyager / 2010-02-24 16:40:

I have to agree with sil here.

This sounds in theory like LyX (http://www.lyx.org/), but less powerful and not necessarily simpler.

U Avalos / 2010-02-24 16:58:

I don't get it. What's the big deal?
This is called emacs w/ org-mode. There's even a mode where you can do math directly in your documents.

U Avalos / 2010-02-24 16:59:

BTW, LyX uses LaTeX as a backend so it's a pain in the rear to customize. You get fugly documents unless you try really really hard

Roberto Alsina / 2010-02-25 00:17:

I'll reply in general...

* This is not LyX because LyX is not a widget I can use, LyX is a while large program that requires a huge program suite (LaTeX) to do anything. Of course I *know* about LyX, where did I get WYSIWYM? ;-)

* This is just a small module + two reasonably-sized libraries (docutils + (optional) rst2pdf) and you do get a LaTeX backend if you really really want/need it.

* Or an OpenOffice backend. Or a manpage backend!

* And no, org-mode is nothing at all like it, at least what I read at orgmode.org. For starters it's not an emacs mode, it's way more hackable (for me) since it's not in elisp ;-)

* You could use this to write Sphinx docs.

* Using stylesheets, the PDF and HTML output is quite flexible, much more flexible than LyX's, probably.

Thomas Zander / 2010-02-25 07:48:

Write a KWord plugin, a docker perhaps or a python script to do this exporting of the current document for you. Could be done in a day and you can export to html and pdf too. (Its a QTextDocument afterall). And to ODF and to anything else that KOffice has export filters for.
There is a GSoC project to export KWord to e-pub format, for instance.
http://techbase.kde.org/KOf...

Roberto Alsina / 2010-02-25 10:08:

The rst to ePub backend already exists.

However, I intend to create a much simpler (and yes, less powerful) app than KWord.

Implementing a kword=>rst converter would be awful because KWord has just too much functionality, so when you take a document you never know if it will convert or lose parts of itself in the process.

Writing a specialized styled editor widget allows me to limit myself to functionality that *works* with that backend, thus keeping the app coherent.


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