On Mon, 5 Aug 2013 16:07:14 +0200 dufriz <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for the clarification. > From what you wrote, I take it that no form of rich text support > (whether Microsoft's RTF or otherwise) is going to be added > *natively* to Leo (i.e. excluding plugins). > Of course, this is your choice as developers, but allow me to point > out that this limits considerably the chances of Leo to compete with > other applications such as Notecase and the like. > > What I would love to see is a *native* implementation of some form of > rich text (at the very least: font colors, sizes, italic, etc - that > is, the basics) within Leo. Only then would I be willing to adopt Leo > as my main production tool.
I don't get it. Everything I've ever seen tells me that RTF is an almost-opaque text format whose only real asset is it's the one way incompatible MSOffice versions can work on each others' content. When you say "main production tool" you don't say what you're producing, but I think if that something is a book, website, ePub, or the like, you're much better off having HTML or XHTML or maybe LaTeX as the transitional file format. MSOffice isn't an optimal print-book/PDF producer, and as far as I know, it's an outright lousy HTML producer. > Having the export tools (to HTML and to RTF) are not good enough, > because what I need is to be able to *see* the projected outcome > visually on the screen, while I am working on it. Like you, I've always favored WYSIWYG myself, when it came to book writing and web page development. Others don't understand my motivation, but I found it sped up authoring. However, this might not be as important now that Firefox sports its Auto-Reload addon and now that computer screens are a lot wider than they are tall. For instance, I write the Bluefish HTML tag editor (definitely not WYSIWYG) on the right, and Firefox with the addon on the left, and every time I save in Bluefish, Firefox updates. It's very much like WYSIWYG authoring. I couldn't find out whether Leo exports XHTML, but if it does, that's perfect. Every time you export you can see it in Firefox. Better yet, I believe that if you do styles-based authoring, and only styles-based authoring, it would be pretty easy to write a Python program to convert XHTML to LaTeX, from which you can get very well formatted PDFs. Like I said, I don't know what you're producing, but I don't know of anything that's optimally produced by RTF. On a slightly different subject, several people have mentioned Leo working with reStructured Text and Markdown as a substitute for it working with RTF. That wouldn't be my opinion, for the simple reason that, as far as I know, neither of those is styles-based. By styles-based, I mean that appearances in the finished document are determined *solely* by the style applied to text elements, and which style you apply to a text element is *solely* determined by what the text represents in the document (I could start throwing around the word "semantically" here, but everyone has a different definition of that word and won't admit it). Anyway, having a style for emphasized text is nowhere near good enough. You could need one for a loud voice type of thing, another for words being defined, another reserved for commandments in the Ten Commandments, another one for optional types of Medicare coverage, and another for each of several kindergarten classes. The fact that, *right now*, each of these things happens to convert to an appearance of italics, does not make them in any other way the same, and to try to do so would do serious harm when you try to convert your work to different formats (ePub, for instance). Once you convert from styles to appearances and throw away the styles, you lose your ability to change elements of one style but not another. Styles-based authoring is where all appearance is defined *only* in style definitions (CSS, LaTeX layout file, MSOffice styles, etc), and the only metadata applied to text elements is the styles applied to those elements. Leo has clones and Leo nodes can have attributes, so I'm pretty sure Leo can easily do styles-based authoring. And if all appearances are applied by style alone, it's pretty darn easy to write Python scripts to convert between XHTML and LaTeX, etc. And a script could be run to update the final format, either upon save, or on time intervals. If you were running Linux, it would be trivial for you to use inotifywait to keep your output formula visible and up to date. I don't know what the Linux equivalent would be. Which leads to the final question: Are any of you writing books in Leo? Thanks, SteveT Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
