[ossig] Word processing in the Church of Emacs

[Christopher DeMarco <cdemarco@fastmail.fm>]

OK guys... This falls under the "don't you have  anything better to do
today"  category.   Bear with me  -  I'm  working  from home to "avoid
distractions at work" ;)

I   have a ton  of   documentation  to write;   and  I'm at  about 60%
productivity because my  fingers have an Emacs  API  in their firmware
while  OOo uses  point-n-drool desktop keybindings.    In other words,
whenever I come back from my notes (done in Emacs,  of course) or from
referencing files (in dired mode, of course) or from wasting time with
email  like this (in mail-mode, of  course), I invariably do something
silly like open up seventeen new windows with  C-n trying to go to the
next line.

Since  I can't  re-program my   fingers,  approach  number one  is  to
shoehorn OOo into an Emacs interface - but while I can envision myself
spending  an entire afternoon with the  point-n-drool interface to map
this-n-that,  OOo  somehow   doesn't   allow   me to  use    Meta  key
combinations, and   that pretty  much  defeats the   whole enterprise.
Anybody know how OOo keybindings work and whether they're "extensible"
- can I edit them from a flat text file, and how in heck can I make it
use Meta for  anything  other  than  menu  shortcuts?  And  yes,  I've
contemplated making a  dummy menu full  of my  Emacs Meta keybindings,
but that would be more of a kludge than I feel like unleashing.

Approach number two is for the "in my day we walked a hundred miles to
school,  uphill both ways -  and we *liked* it  that way" crowd: Can I
TOTALLY ignore that it's   2003 and just use  TEX!?   I know I can  do
beautiful  semi- WYSIWYG editing  in Emacs; but  unfortunately I still
have to talk to other meatspace beings  and they all  use Word.  I can
convert from TEX to PDF, sure... but what if somebody wants to edit my
documents again later?  Can I convert  TEX to Word!?  And does anybody
who's actually used  TEX care to comment   on the beauty or  horror of
using TEX for word processing / print formatting?  All  I know is that
if I accidentally "re-paginate  deconstructify DTD un-register locale"
by accident  ONE    MORE TIME  (instead of   font-lock-mode  auto-fill
regexp-search-current-buffer) I'm gonna chuck OOo out the OpenWindows.

Hm. Fifteen minutes wasted.  Not bad... 

-- 
% You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
Christopher DeMarco
cdemarco@fastmail.fm
+6013 389 5658


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