From: mjr@ursa.calvin.edu (Matt Ranney) Subject: Re: Let's write a wordprocessor. Date: Thu, 20 May 1993 19:02:39 GMT
jcburt@gatsibm.larc.nasa.gov () writes:
>hmmm...I guess I was mistaken when I thought that LateX code is
>"regular ASCII that can be sent through email without wacky coding..."
No, thats not what I meant. Sure LaTeX code is all 7-bit and all, and
you can woosh it all over through email. Fine, this is what we want.
>I guess I haven't been sending LaTeX source documents via
>email for several years now...can't say the same about WP5.1 files...:-)
Exactly. You can't send WP5.1 files around without the aforementioned
"wacky coding".
>Why re-invent a file format when you have one already that does exactly
>what you want...?
Because it doesn't. OK, why is LaTeX a good output file format?
Because LaTeX/TeX are popular and some people write that code
directly. I'm assuming that in addition to feeding these files to
TeX, these people are also going to want to modify them and do other
crazy macro definitions and stuff like that. How can we read this in
again? Should we have a complete TeX parser built in to this new
program? No, we shouldn't. We should have a SAVE file format that is
not nice to edit, but is a 7-bit ASCII file that can be read in again
by this program. Then we should have several OUTPUT file formats that
will give you LaTeX, PostScript, WP5.1, whatever you want.