🚀 go-pugleaf

hofmann@cs.uiuc.edu (hofmann) writes:

      IMHO, I think that formating the the text is a bad idea because then you
   move away from the "just text" nature of un*x files and toward the extremely
   program-dependant (and nonportable, and more difficult to transmit) format of
   PCs such as the Macintosh.

I don't agree.  It would certainly be a bad idea to have "universal"
formatting, such as Word uses -- where every data file must contain
specific formatting information in order for the editor to be able to
handle it.  But that was never in the cards anyway.

It would be extremely useful for Emacs to provide support for
developing major modes capable of doing formatting based on the
contents of a file.  Ideally (I don't expect this to actually happen),
one would be able to construct an Emacs *Word* mode that would read
Word files, edit them in WYSIWYG fashion with Word functionality (on
systems with X-Windows), and output properly formatted Word files.

Less ambitiously, C mode could be rewritten to display comments in an
italic font and function headers in bold; LaTeX mode could display
formatting commands in a different color, etc.  Extensibility and
customizability are the important things.

	-- Bill