{"id":827,"date":"2004-05-18T10:34:46","date_gmt":"2004-05-18T14:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=827"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"writeright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2004\/05\/18\/writeright\/","title":{"rendered":"WriteRight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/db.tidbits.com\/getbits.acgi?tbart=07670\">Adam Engst<\/a> describes his fantasy word processor, and it&rsquo;s pretty close to mine. Of course, I would add some pet features like conditional text (a distinct concept from an &ldquo;invisible&rdquo; style attribute), scriptability, good automatic image placement, beautiful equations, and powerful auto-numbering (which is what Engst&rsquo;s searching example really motivates, to my mind).<\/p>\n\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/db.tidbits.com\/getbits.acgi?tbart=07670\">\nIn short, WriteRight must essentially clone almost every feature of Word that matters (and I haven&rsquo;t even mentioned things like tables and hyperlinks) to be able to read a Word file without losing data, and more to the point, to be able to write the file back out with all data equally intact. It&rsquo;s a tall order, and one that may not be feasible.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>\nAside from the engineering work this would entail, full Word compatibility would impose a lot of constraints on the word processor&rsquo;s design. I&rsquo;m not sure that it&rsquo;s possible to be significantly better than Word, and yet fully compatible with it. But we can dream, right?\n<\/p>\n\n<p>\nAnd now for my tall order: WriteRight should be easy to use and WYSIWYG, like a traditional Mac word processor. But it should also be possible to customize it programmatically. I don&rsquo;t mean just automating its existing features via AppleScript, but rather the ability to add new features (such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.essex.ac.uk\/linguistics\/clmt\/latex4ling\/trees\/parsetree\/\">trees<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.essex.ac.uk\/linguistics\/clmt\/latex4ling\/examples\/gb4e\/index_2.html\">glosses<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tex.ac.uk\/tex-archive\/macros\/latex\/contrib\/listings\/\">parser-directed formatting<\/a>), &agrave; la LaTeX.\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adam Engst describes his fantasy word processor, and it&rsquo;s pretty close to mine. Of course, I would add some pet features like conditional text (a distinct concept from an &ldquo;invisible&rdquo; style attribute), scriptability, good automatic image placement, beautiful equations, and powerful auto-numbering (which is what Engst&rsquo;s searching example really motivates, to my mind). In short, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}