[ale] Survey -- preferred Text Editor

[dmr at naunetcorp.com (David Raker)]

Emacs. 

My aunt wrote a 500 page genealogy book which she needed typeset.   It
had been written in MSWorks 3 on an ancient Macintosh (c. 1990).
Microsoft had abandoned the file format (and then Works for Mac) nearly
20 years earlier, so no modern systems could read the file.  After some
work getting the file to be readable by anything less Jurassic, I was
left with a text file full of mangled formatting, random whitespace,
broken paragraphs, etc.  Since much of the book took the form of nested
descriptive lists and block quotes, nothing could be done until this was
fixed. 

I began doing this manually, but based on the progress I was making, it
would have taken me a few full time weeks to accomplish. I was able to
build some Lisp macros in emacs to automate most of the work, inserting
LaTex along the way, and reduced what would have taken weeks of manual
work into a few hours (including learning Lisp for the purpose).

I could also have done something similar using some other scripting
language, sed, etc, but for some tasks it is easier to record a macro
and for others to write one.  Emacs provides both, and I used both.

I am sure vi can do plenty of heavy lifting as well, but I have never
tried.  Most other text editors simply don't have any facility for doing
things like that.

> What's everyone preferred text editor?

-- 

	David M. Raker

Director, *Naunet Corporation*
? (678) 287-0693 x131 or (855) NAUNET-1 x131
FAX: (678) 783-7843

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