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.
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.
Everyone should *always* put the code somewhere ;-)
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)
I don't get it. What's so special about it? Style templates aren't exactly something new ;-)
You're describing LyX, my man :)
What i was going to say. I don't use LyX enough.
I have to agree with sil here.
This sounds in theory like LyX (http://www.lyx.org/), but less powerful and not necessarily simpler.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.